Rays in OpticStudio

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From the course by University of Colorado Boulder

First Order Optical System Design

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University of Colorado Boulder

First Order Optical System Design

23 ratings

Course 1 of 3 in the Specialization Optical Engineering

Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. When you finish this course, you will be able to design, to first order, such optical systems with simple mathematical and graphical techniques. This first order design will allow you to develop the foundation needed to begin all optical design as well as the intuition needed to quickly address the feasibility of complicated designs during brainstorming meetings. You will learn how to enter these designs into an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax, to analyze and improve performance with powerful automatic optimization methods.

From the lesson

Introduction to Geometrical Optics

This module introduces rays, which we use to describe the motion of light through air and materials. The course overview describes the goals of this course and gives tips on how to make the best use of the course materials to be successful. The lectures introduce the material. The in-video questions, lab demonstrations, PhET interactive demonstration, practice problems, and homework assignment allow you to get actively involved in learning the material.

Introduction to Geometrical Optics4:07

What are rays?11:31

Pinhole Camera5:10

Rays in OpticStudio2:51

Meet the Instructors

Amy Sullivan
Research Associate
Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering
Robert McLeod
Professor
Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Snell's law and the concept of rays are

the foundation of geometrical optics

and what we're going to be using for the whole semester.

We're going to be tracing these rays bending and

surfaces with Snell's law in relatively complex systems with lots of surfaces,

and we don't want to do that by hand.

We want to start learning that way,

but not to design it that way.

That motivates the use of

a computer-aided design tool that can automate these calculations for us.

In this course, we're going to be using

Zemax's OpticStudio and this is a preview of what that can do for us.

So what I show here is much like the calculations we showed in the notes,

is I have a block of glass,

I have a set of parallel rays,

the blue lines, that represent a plane wave.

Remember, phase fronts normal to those rays.

That intersects that glass surface,

and the program knows and uses Snell's law

to calculate a new refraction angle for each ray,

when I enter and exit the block of glass.

Now, that in itself isn't terribly exciting,

but I can now curve these surfaces as such.

Now, locally, the refraction angle,

theta in Snell's law,

depends on where I hit the surface because the surface is curved.

That means that the refraction angle,

the direction the ray goes inside the glass,

depends on where the ray hit the glass.

So when I refract through a curved surface and back out into air,

I've converted this plane wave into

something which is like a spherical wave and converging.

I can only really know if it is a spherical wave if I

went over here and looked at where the rays finally all come together,

and see if they actually come to an absolute point.

If they don't all intersect at a point,

then this is something that's a converging wave that isn't actually a sphere.

Again, that would be a hard thing to describe mathematically,

but these rays are straight lines and thus very easy to calculate.

So, we're going to learn how to use this program,

how to put optical systems together with lenses,

prisms, things like that,

and then the program will run the ray equations that we've just learned,

Snell's law of refraction and reflection,

in order to calculate properties of the optical system

which really are derived from Maxwell's equations, as we've just learned.

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