Competitive Advantage
Polaris-M provides numerous options for modeling and tolerancing polarization components in optical systems providing analysis capabilities appropriate to any part of the design process.
In the concept development stage retarders and polarizers can simply be modeled by applying the appropriate Jones matrix to a surface. At this stage Fresnel reflection losses and subsequent polarization aberrations may be ignored.
As your concept develops Jones surfaces and perfect coatings might not be sufficient to understand the polarization pupil aberrations and off-axis performance of your optical system. Jones surfaces can be replaced with retarder and polarizer models that provide accurate off-axis polarization properties. Thin-film coating prescriptions provide accurate transmission and polarization from interfaces.
Thin-film coatings and basic polarization models can be selected from databases to provide reasonable baseline performance. Polaris-M and Mathematica provide a powerful platform for refining thin-film coatings to your exact specifications.
Polarization elements can also be selected from a database of common components measured with an Axometrics Mueller matrix polarimeter over a range of incident angles and imported as a Polaris-M surface.
At this stage the polarization model will be highly accurate for the vast majority of optical systems. Polaris-M's ray tracing and analysis tools will provide polarization dependent image quality in the form of a Jones pupil and amplitude response matrix.
Polaris-M's tolerancing functionality provides sensitivity tables and Monte Carlo simulations over any optical, geometric, or polarization parameters of your design.
After specifying and ordering components you might want to know how the as-built parts are going to affect your performance. Polaris-M provides compatibility with Axometrics polarimeters so you can add measurements to your measured parts catalog and import them into Polaris-M. All tolerancing features will continue to work with measured parts.
If you are designing an instrument with complex crystal optics, such as a crystal depolarizer, the off-axis retarder model will be insufficient to analyze your system. Polaris-M will instead model the part using its crystal optics capabilities. Rays will split into multiple rays at birefringent interfaces and multiple wavefronts will end up propagating through the optical system. Polaris-M's full featured analysis tools will help with retardance calculations from any number of combined orders.
Diffraction gratings and sub-wavelength gratings can also be calculated at various levels of rigor by changing how many evanescent waves Polaris-M includes in its RCWA calculations.
All of the surfaces used in Polaris-M are compatible with non-sequential ray-tracing allowing analysis of polarization dependent ghosting.