A New Generation System for Optical Design and Analysis!

To design and analyze your optical systems, don't settle for traditional ray-tracing software that restricts your choices to a prescribed set of catalog components and configurations. With Optica you can develop specialized optics systems and component designs without limits. While providing experienced designers an environment flexible enough for even the most sophisticated optical systems, the many examples included make Optica easy to learn.

In addition to Optica's easy-access collection of hundreds of different lenses, mirrors, prisms, gratings, and more, you can quickly create your own components or modify existing ones using Optica's robust component-structuring language. You can turn a standard lens or parabolic mirror into its flattened Fresnel equivalent with a single command, for example.

The first geometric ray-tracing system written for a symbolic programming environment, Optica gives you complete control over the shape of every surface and component--you enter your own symbolic expressions to define them. Make pinholes and place them in any location, or specify circular, rectangular, elliptical, or arbitrary-sided polygonal-shaped apertures for any surface edge or surface hole. Generate optical fibers, lens doublets and triplets, pipes, laser, beam splitters, screens, and baffles to your exact specifications. Experiment with an endless variety of possibilities when you define new refractive materials, modify Optica's catalog of commonly used glasses, crystals, and fluids, or expand on Optica's library of on-axis and off-axis spherical, cylindrical, and parabolic curved components with shapes and objects of your own.

Optica's hundreds of built-in functions not only help you create all kinds of components, they make it easy to analyze many different system configurations. You can define a system in modular segments that you position independently in three-dimensional space, then combine to model a total system. Optica can also describe all the intersection points along a ray-tracing path, provide the optical path length of each ray, generate an intensity map for any surface in your system, and display an animation to help you visualize the path of a single ray or set of rays within a system.

The publication-quality, two- and three-dimensional graphics you create with Optica are perfect for placing directly in your blueprints and research reports. And educators save valuable school lab time and resources when they have students use Optica to create endless experimental variations and safely study the results.

Features

• Customizable Components
(with rectangular, circular, elliptical, or arbitrary polygonal edges)
• Lenses--Fresnel, Lenticular Arrays
• Mirrors
• Prisms
• Cavities
• Slits
• Pinholes
• Gratings, Baffles, Optical Fibers, Beam Splitters, and Screens
• Paraxial Components--Thin and Thick Lenses, ABCD Matrix, Graded Index

Surfaces

• Including off-axis and Fresnel variations
• Spherical, Parabolic, Cylindrical, Elliptical, and Planar
• User-Defined

2D and 3D Rendering

• Solid and Wire-Frame Surfaces
• Magnified Subgroupings
• Spot Diagrams

Modeling

• Complete Quantitative Ray-Tracing Results
• User-Defined Refractive Materials
• User-Defined Gain and Absorption
• User-Defined Diffractive Elements

Advanced 3D Ray Tracing

• Automatic (Nonsequential) and User-Directed Ray-Surface Intercept Sequencing
• Multiple Independent Ray Paths
• Multiple Intercepts on a Single Surface
• Multiple Bounces and Total Internal Reflections

Specific Applications of Optica

• System Design and Analysis
• Astronomical Systems
• Lasers
• Spectroscopic Systems
• Holographic Systems
• Remote Sensing Systems
• Illumination Systems

Education

• Interactive Optics Courseware
• Computer-Based Laboratory Experiments