Modeling Light Fields on Tilted Planes for Tolerancing and Reflective Components

Beyond ray tracing light fields are typically represented by sampled complex amplitudes in planes orthogonal to a local z-axis. Physical optics techniques allow the calculation of a propagated field in a plane parallel to the input plane. Though the restriction to parallel planes in physical optics modeling is very typical, it is a serious restriction for the future development of optical modeling. We discuss that at two examples: (1) In tolerancing, lenses or other components are tilted. Propagating the field to a tilted plane aligned with the component would improve the modeling accuracy. (2) In order to model the effect of a microstructured mirror with high accuracy, it is important to know the field in the tilted mirror plane. In our talk we discuss different physical models to calculate fields on tilted planes and its numerical implications. Geometrical optics techniques take into account the field deformation. Wave optical effects demand for physical optics techniques. We also describe the effect on the vectorial representation of the field. The software LightTrans VirtualLab(TM) provides modeling fields on tilted planes and is used for the numerical examples that are shown.