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Physical optics methods for laser and nonlinear optics simulations

  • Rolf Wester

    Rolf Wester is a scientist at the Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen. He received his Diploma (MSc) in Physics in 1983 from the Technical University of Darmstadt and his Doctorate (PhD) in 1987 from the RWTH Aachen. In the same year he changed from the RWTH to the Fraunhofer ILT where he continued working on high frequency excitation of gas lasers. In recent years his fields of research interests switched to optics. He is now mainly concerned with the development of simulation software for physical optics problems and of numerical design tools for freeform optical elements.

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Abstract

The development of optical systems today is strongly supported by computer simulations. Computer ray tracing tools are well established in the field of geometrical optics for designing objectives, light channels, etc. Ray tracing is conceptually quite simple, which makes the implementation as well as the interpretation of ray tracing results easy, although the design of high-quality lens systems remains a challenging task. In the field of wave optics, there are software tools as well, but they are still not as mature as the ray tracing tools. The main reason for this is that numerically solving partial differential equations is numerically more complex and not as intuitive as ray tracing. Besides simple wave propagation, the main field of use of the wave optics methods today is the development of lasers and laser resonator and nonlinear optics. The optical properties of the media, in general, depend on the temperature and mechanical stresses. The interaction of the electromagnetic fields with matter, thus, has to self-consistently include thermomechanical computations.


Corresponding author: Rolf Wester, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT, Steinbachstr. 15, 52074 Aachen, Germany

About the author

Rolf Wester

Rolf Wester is a scientist at the Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen. He received his Diploma (MSc) in Physics in 1983 from the Technical University of Darmstadt and his Doctorate (PhD) in 1987 from the RWTH Aachen. In the same year he changed from the RWTH to the Fraunhofer ILT where he continued working on high frequency excitation of gas lasers. In recent years his fields of research interests switched to optics. He is now mainly concerned with the development of simulation software for physical optics problems and of numerical design tools for freeform optical elements.

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Received: 2012-10-5
Accepted: 2013-1-18
Published Online: 2013-03-14
Published in Print: 2013-06-01

©2013 by THOSS Media & De Gruyter Berlin Boston

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