On the Importance of Homeomorphic Operations in Physical and Geometrical Optics

Jena, 17 September 2019, EOS Topical Meeting on Diffractive Optics

Physical-optics system modeling can be performed by connecting different rigorous and approximated field solvers, which are selected to efficiently solve Maxwell’s equations in the individual mathematical regions into which a system can be torn. We discuss the case in which a sequence of connected solvers constitutes a 1:1 mapping between the input and the output fields. It turns out that such sequences are (1) the key to fast phy- sical optics and (2) they reveal how ray tracing is embedded in and accessible through physical optics.