Gaussian quadrature integration for rms spot size or wavefront error:
> Forbes, G. W. (1989). Optical system assessment for design: numerical ray tracing in the Gaussian pupil. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 6(8), 1123. https://doi.org/10.1364/josaa.6.001123
In general, you'll want to look at MTF calculation (look at Zemax's manual for explanation/how-to). There is also a technique to target optimization at particular spatial frequencies:
> K. E. Moore, E. Elliott, et. al. "Digital Contrast Optimization - A faster and better method for optimizing system MTF," in Optical Design and Fabrication 2017 (Freeform, IODC, OFT), OSA Technical Digest (online) (Optical Society of America, 2017), paper IW1A.3
A few notes, though paraxial approximations are "dumb", they are very useful tools for lens designers and understanding/constraining the design space - calculating the F/#, aperture stop, principal planes and is critical in some approaches. This pushes what autodiff tools are capable of because you need to get Hessians of your surface. There's also a rich history in objective function definition and quadrature integration techniques thereof which you can work to implement, and you may like to have users be able to specify explicit parametric constraints.
I received my PhD in applied physics and had colleagues, collaborators, and some published work in this (very broad) field. Although I'm familiar with the programs, my advice is not specific.
The question you have to answer first is: why do you want a PhD? Is it to do science for as long as possible? Is it to contribute to the frontier of human knowledge? Is it to participate in an global research community? Is it to land a tenure track job? Or do you not know the questions and their answers (which is fine!)?
I'll offer myself as a case study. I knew I wanted to make something tangible (hence device physics / photonics), I knew I wanted to explore the possibility of continuing in academia, and I knew that I would enjoy working in industry. I structured my PhD to go for a high risk/high reward research topic (with the thinking that if it pans out, academia would be viable without having to go through an extended PhD and multiple postdocs, which was off the table for me). I also set up to consult on industry projects, and started poking around the local startup incubators and B-school entrepreneurial offerings. My school (and PI) choice was motivated really by these factors: how I judged the impact of potential research being done by the team, how plugged-in and amenable was the environment to extracurricular work, and how supported I would be to a transition to start-ups/industry.
Figure out what you want, and treat your PhD itself as an experiment w/ testable hypotheses. If you're not sure about something, how can you build into the experience a way to find out? Is it a class, a side-project, the local community that can help? There are many factors to take into account when choosing a school because we all weigh those factors differently - once you decide what's really important to you you'll get better-tuned advice.
Metalenz | Boston, MA | Software Engineering and Computer Vision Roles | Onsite & Remote | https://www.metalenz.com
Metalenz is a growing, venture-backed start-up that is the first to commercialize meta-optics and enable the next generation of 3D sensing in consumer electronics, automotive and industrial robotics markets. Unlike traditional optics, the company’s metasurface technology provides complex, multifunctional optical performance in a single semiconductor layer, relocating large-scale production of optics to semiconductor foundries, that print lenses like computer chips.
We are looking for engineers across our company, please reach out if any of the following sound interesting to you:
* Computer vision models and algorithms using our unique hardware, leveraging polarization degrees of freedom of light (from deep learning models to low-level computational imaging)
* Performant, hardware-secure imaging on Android
* Instrumentation and automation of optical metrology systems
* TCAD-equivalent tooling for optical system design
We offer competitive salary and equity. Benefits include full medical, dental, and vision coverage, and flexible vacation policy. If you have any questions or want to apply, please reach out to Pawel at [email protected], or apply at our website here: https://www.metalenz.com/careers.
We (metalenz.com) use Julia extensively in our optical design/simulation/modeling workflows:
1. Design team keeps live sessions during interactive work, otherwise launches on virtualized servers (and things take sufficiently long to compute TTFX is a rounding error)
2. Above mentioned team is exclusively Julia. Julia shows up in other things we do (low-level computer vision), but not dominant nor exclusive
3. High performance & expressive programming and flexible autodiff system for scientific computation
> Forbes, G. W. (1989). Optical system assessment for design: numerical ray tracing in the Gaussian pupil. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 6(8), 1123. https://doi.org/10.1364/josaa.6.001123
In general, you'll want to look at MTF calculation (look at Zemax's manual for explanation/how-to). There is also a technique to target optimization at particular spatial frequencies:
> K. E. Moore, E. Elliott, et. al. "Digital Contrast Optimization - A faster and better method for optimizing system MTF," in Optical Design and Fabrication 2017 (Freeform, IODC, OFT), OSA Technical Digest (online) (Optical Society of America, 2017), paper IW1A.3