Ray-based Physical Optics for the Design of Astronomical Observatories
type: CreativeWork
description: For diffraction-limited optical systems an accurate physical optics model is necessary to properly evaluate instrument performance. Industry-standard commercial optical design packages as well as existing open-source physical optics tools achieve this by the propagation of a complex-valued scalar optical field through the system. This requires the evaluation of diffraction integrals via Fourier transforms of large arrays and can consequently be computationally intensive. The scalar assumption also obfuscates polarization-dependent behavior, which has been shown to be a considerable performance limiter for astronomical observatories that seek to image earth-like exoplanets. These observatories are outfitted with coronagraphs, which are designed to image faint stellar companions at high contrast using specialized pupil-plane and image-plane masks. When imaging Earth-like exoplanets at small angular separations, coronagraphs are limited by telescope stability and polarization aberrations. The state of the art handles the diffraction model, ray aberration model, and polarization model separately across multiple research and development centers which complicates the design process. This research adds new propagation physics to the open source to capture the geometrical and physical regimes of the electric field simultaneously. To do so, we’ve built an open-source platform which contains two new physics modules. Gaussian beamlet decomposition is a ray-based diffraction calculation which permits the modeling of ray aberration and diffraction simultaneously. We outline a formal algorithm for its general implementation in ray trace models of optical systems, and propose a novel approach that increases its computational efficiency for more accessible use. Polarization ray tracing is a ray-based method of vector field propagation that enables the simulation of polarization aberrations, a known performance limiter for high-contrast imaging instruments. We characterize the polar…
abstract: For diffraction-limited optical systems an accurate physical optics model is necessary to properly evaluate instrument performance. Industry-standard commercial optical design packages as well as existing open-source physical optics tools achieve this by the propagation of a complex-valued scalar optical field through the system. This requires the evaluation of diffraction integrals via Fourier transforms of large arrays and can consequently be computationally intensive. The scalar assumption also obfuscates polarization-dependent behavior, which has been shown to be a considerable performance limiter for astronomical observatories that seek to image earth-like exoplanets. These observatories are outfitted with coronagraphs, which are designed to image faint stellar companions at high contrast using specialized pupil-plane and image-plane masks. When imaging Earth-like exoplanets at small angular separations, coronagraphs are limited by telescope stability and polarization aberrations. The state of the art handles the diffraction model, ray aberration model, and polarization model separately across multiple research and development centers which complicates the design process. This research adds new propagation physics to the open source to capture the geometrical and physical regimes of the electric field simultaneously. To do so, we’ve built an open-source platform which contains two new physics modules. Gaussian beamlet decomposition is a ray-based diffraction calculation which permits the modeling of ray aberration and diffraction simultaneously. We outline a formal algorithm for its general implementation in ray trace models of optical systems, and propose a novel approach that increases its computational efficiency for more accessible use. Polarization ray tracing is a ray-based method of vector field propagation that enables the simulation of polarization aberrations, a known performance limiter for high-contrast imaging instruments. We characterize the polar…
author: Ashcraft, Jaren N.
language: en
license: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
date published: 2024
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:55:35Z
provider: University of Arizona
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Arizona.

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/674408