Laser System Modeling with Fast Physical Optics

San Francisco, 30th of January, 2018, SPIE Photonics West

Nowadays, the development of modern laser systems tends to be more and more integrated and compact. A huge variety of components with specific purposes and in largely different dimension scales can be seen even in a single laser system. As a result, the difficulty in modeling and designing such a system increases dramatically. To model such systems, instead of attempting to use multiple disciplines in combination, we adhere to physical optics, which is governed by Maxwell’s equations. Especially, by fast physical optics, we emphasize on highly efficient solutions to Maxwell’s equations, based on 1) the paradigm shift of switching the main modeling domain from space to spatial frequency domain; 2) innovative Fourier transform concepts that minimize the field sampling parameters. With these techniques, components ranging from sub-wavelength gratings to prisms, and from structured waveguides to laser crystals, can all be included. In addition to optics itself, it is possible to take other physical aspects and their impact on the optical performance into consideration in a flexible manner, such as mechanical and thermal effects in laser packaging processes. We will present simulations of several typical modern laser systems based on fast physical optics modeling.