What’s new in our Optical Modeling and Design Software?

Thin-film layer structures paired with strongly absorbing materials such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) have been a stable technology for solar cell and photovoltaic applications for roughly three decades. To ensure as high an efficiency as possible, the optical engineer should optimize the materials used and layer thicknesses of the cell. To help with this task, the fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion provides various tools, like the Stratified Media Component, that allow for an easy-to-use configuration of the layer system, as well as the ability to configure coating materials either by selecting them from our comprehensive in-built database, or by specifying their optical characteristics such as real part of the refractive index and absorption coefficient.

In this newsletter we share an introduction of our Stratified Media Component, as well as a simulation of an setup for a CIGS-based solar cell.

Spectroscopy – the study of the spectral (wavelength) composition of light – remains an important field of study in optics. Poly- or monochromators, which employ the dispersive behavior of diffractive elements to separate the different spectral components of incoming light in different directions, are often selected for this task because of their ease of use and adjustability.

The “connecting field solvers” approach implemented in the fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion can simulate complex systems made up of a variety of components, as is the case in this field: gratings and refractive elements (such as parabolic mirrors) are both unavoidable parts of spectroscopic systems. This capacity of VirtualLab Fusion to simulate realistic, complex systems with its fully vectorial, fast physical optics engine offers the optical engineer invaluable tools for the task of designing and analyzing this kind of setups. As an example, this week we present a classical Czerny-Turner monochromator and give a detailed insight into the properties of our grating component.

Imaging systems are one of the historical cornerstones of optics, with numerous applications in a wide range of different technologies. Therefore, the performance analysis of lens systems commonly used in imaging is a fundamental task for many optical engineers. To assist the optical engineer in this endeavor, VirtualLab Fusion offers a number of powerful tools.

In this newsletter, we would like to highlight, in particular, the tools for the analysis of field curvature and distortion. These two imaging errors stem from the fact that most detectors operate as plane surfaces, while lenses focus light onto a curve. These aberrations can be investigated with the easy-to-use integrated tools that VirtualLab Fusion puts at your disposal, as shown in the following examples.

Diffractive optical elements (DOEs) are optical components that use the diffractive properties of engraved microstructures to transform the incoming beam into the desired light distribution, using the periodicity of the structure or lack thereof to create discrete (beam splitters) or continuous patterns (beam shapers, diffusers) respectively. Because the working principle of these components is based on the diffraction of the light by these patterned surfaces, DOE beam shapers and beam splitters can be designed much thinner and lighter than their refractive counterparts, but the small structure sizes make them difficult and resource-intensive to simulate.

In this field, the fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion offers a family of field solvers based on the Thin Element Approximation (TEA), which allow optical engineers to design systems with this type of devices and to analyze their behavior. As an example, below you can find an investigation of the angular dependence of a reflective diffractive beam splitter, as well as a document offering a deeper look into our diffractive optical element and microstructure components.

Volume Holographic Gratings (VHGs) are well-known for their high spectral and angular sensitivity combined with adjustable diffraction efficiencies. Hence these gratings are an appropriate tool in optical systems that require accurate spectral and angular filtering. Due to their characteristic three-dimensional and smooth modulation of the refractive index, the modeling can pose numerical challenges, e.g. determining a fine-enough discretization to respect the continuous nature of the refractive-index profile. This can make a simulation of such structures quite demanding computationally, especially when the volume grating is used as just one component in a full, more complex system.

The fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion enables a fast and accurate simulation of even complex optical systems containing Volume Holographic Gratings by combining specialized solvers for the individual components, such as the Fourier Modal Method in the case of VHGs. Check out the use cases below for an example of an angular-filtering volume grating used in conjunction with a diffractive beam splitter to improve the initial design, as well as an overall introduction on how to configure a volume grating in VirtualLab Fusion.

For many applications in the field of high-power laser scanning systems it is important to ensure that off-axis focal spots lie on the focal plane, and not, as happens with regular spherical lenses, along a curved surface. F-theta lenses have been developed with this requirement in mind and are designed to focus incoming collimated beams into a focal spot whose lateral displacement ideally depends linearly on the scan angle.

The fast physical optics and design software VirtualLab Fusion provides several tools that allow the optical engineer to examine the performance of a particular f-theta design. These include the Distortion Analyzer, which calculates the deviation between the actual and desired spot positions, and a scanning source that allows for the simultaneous configuration of a set of field-of-view modes with different incident directions, for a more convenient investigation of the system. Furthermore, the powerful Field Tracing engine gives the user the possibility to investigate the behavior of the focal spots (point spread function) with physical optics, which is capable of uncovering additional effects not taken into account with a pure ray tracer.

Being able to vary the parameters of an optical system is a key part of the analysis of any setup, in order to better understand how the system will behave in the face of anything from manufacturing errors to potential misalignment of the components. Designing a system that shows robustness when confronted with these unavoidable deviations from the idealized intended design can be just as important as, if not even more than, finding an initial design that perfectly fulfills all the specifications.

With this in mind, the fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion offers its Parameter Run document: a tool that allows the user to flexibly configure the variation of all system parameters and analyze the corresponding results. In today's newsletter, we would like to show how this tool can improve the optical engineer's workflow with two examples. In the first example, we examine the properties of a collimating lens and automatically export the detector results to a specified file path (for additional post-processing, for instance). In the second example, we use the fully customizable programmable mode of the Parameter Run to realize different random distributions for the variations of the parameters of interest, in order to perform a tolerance analysis of a sawtooth grating.

Due to their ability to split a single laser beam into multiple beams in combination with well-defined power ratios, diffractive beam splitters are widely used for applications such as laser material processing and optical metrology. But because of the small feature sizes required for non-paraxial or even high-NA splitting or diffraction angles, the design and optimization of this type of device can be challenging. VirtualLab Fusion provides optical engineers with several tools to assist them in this task.

To illustrate the general workflow, we showcase two examples: In the first example, we employ the Iterative Fourier Transform Algorithm (IFTA) alongside a structure design based on the Thin Element Approximation (TEA) to generate a series of initial designs for a beam splitter, which are then rigorously analyzed and further optimized rigorously with the Fourier Modal Method/Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis (FMM/RCWA). In order to define a suitable and efficient merit function for that last optimization step, the Programmable Grating Analyzer is applied. The second example covers this part of the process in more detail.