The Light Path Diagram: A User-Friendly Component-Based Concept for Describing and Simulating Optical Systems

Optical systems are build up typically by a light source, a sequence of optical components (examples are spherical and aspherical lenses, apertures, beam splitters) and by detectors. In the presentation, we introduce the concept of the Light Path Diagram (LPD) that is used in the software LightTrans VirtualLabTM to describe and to simulate such systems. On the user side, the LPD allows to configure a system in a user-friendly graphical environment. Each optical component corresponds to one Light Path Element (LPE). In comparison to a spread sheet approach, that is often used in conventional software tools, LPEs simplify the usage since the physical parameters of one component are assigned to the corresponding LPE. Besides advantages on the user side, the component-based concept is the basis for algorithmic enhancements for the simulation. In particular the propagation technique being used can be adjusted to each component independent of others. In this way optimized simulation results with respect to accuracy and resource requirements can be achieved.