Upcoming Webinars
Below you may find a list of our upcoming webinars.
PhotonicNet Webinar: Flat Optics – about Freeform, Fresnel, Diffractive and Meta Lenses
28 January 2021
10:00 – 11:30 (CET)
Register here
New Features in VirtualLab Fusion for Fiber Optics
3 February 2021
10:00 – 11:00 and 18:00 – 19:00 (CET)
Register here
Previous Webinars
Below you may find a list of our webinars which have already taken place. Fill out the form on the webinar page and get access to our webinar for watching it on demand.
Diffractive Lenses: Concept, Modeling, Design, and Fabrication Data
Smooth, often spherical, surfaces between homogeneous media dominate lens design. The introduction of aspherical and freeform surfaces has added design freedom to obtain compact lens systems with improved quality and new functions. According to the Fresnel equations, surfaces typically do not add a phase variation to the incident light. Diffractive surfaces introduce the freedom to add an extra phase variation onto the incident light. Interest in how to use this extra design freedom best has gained momentum in recent years, aiming at more compact systems and better performance. The nature of the diffractive structure allows for special functionalities like multiple foci, but also leads to some challenges, like a strong wavelength dependency.
Gratings as a Part of Optical Systems
The construction of optical systems combining diffraction gratings and lenses and other smooth surfaces is a common occurrence, across many applications like spectroscopy, in microscopy using the grating as a test object, or in AR & MR glasses. This is not reflected in the field of simulation: it is rare, even today, to find software which can convincingly tackle the modeling of such systems. The reason for this is the vast difference in the structural dimensions of the two types of components, which means drastically different algorithms are needed for each of them.
Lightguides for Mixed Reality Glasses: Design Techniques and Challenges
The use of lightguides with diffraction gratings has become of great interest in the development of augmented reality and mixed reality glasses. The propagation of light through such lightguides requires simulation techniques beyond ray tracing. It must be possible to include physical-optics effects in a controllable manner to meet the needs in modeling and design. This webinar will introduce you to a suitable physical-optics modeling technology and demonstrate it in the software VirtualLab Fusion.
Simulation of Interferometric Setups with VirtualLab Fusion
Interferometry as a discipline proves useful in a wide range of applications, and interferometric setups can just as easily be found in the laboratories of educational institutions for the demonstration of fundamental physical effects to budding students, as in cutting-edge industrial systems for many different purposes, like surface quality characterization and sensing, among others. And that is not to mention the medical and biological fields, where interferometry forms the basis for multiple non-invasive diagnostic tools.
Modeling and Design of Metagratings
Metagratings and more general metasurfaces are shown to be potentially powerful devices for various applications. In comparison to the traditional diffractive gratings, metagratings are known for maintaining a high diffraction efficiency in non-paraxial situations. Polarization-insensitive designs are possible with an appropriate selection of the types of nanopillars as the unit cells for the metagratings.