Optica is an optical design program used for the design and analysis of both imaging and illumination systems."Software Packages Simplify Complex Optical System Design" ESCO optics, Wickersham It works by ray tracing the propagation of rays through an optical system. It performs polarization ray-tracing, non-sequential ray-tracing, energy calculations, and optimization of optical systems in three-dimensional space. It also performs symbolic modeling of optical systems, diffraction, interference, wave-front, and Gaussian beam propagation calculations. In addition to conducting simulations of optical designs, Optica is used by scientists to create illustrations of the simulated results in publications. Some examples of Optica being used in simulations and illustrations include holography,"New software tools facilitate the development of better holographic systems" Holography, The International Society for Optical Engineering, June 2005, Vol. 16, No.1 x-ray optics, spectrometers, Cerenkov radiation,"Experimental Testing of Dynamically Optimized Photoelectron Beams, p12-15" Proceedings of the 46th Workshop of the INFN ELOISATRON Project, Erice, Italy, 9 – 14 October 2005 microwave optics, nonlinear optics, scattering, camera design,"Measurement of oxygen saturation in the retina with a spectroscopic sensitive multi aperture camera" Optics Express, Vol16, No9, 2008, p 6173 extreme ultraviolet lithography simulations,"Partially coherent extreme ultraviolet interference lithography for 16 nm patterning research" Applied Physics Letters Volume 93, 083110, 2008M. Goldstein, V. Bakshi. Optical Design for Affordable EUV Lithography, Int. Sym. EUVL., Sapporo, Japan (2007). telescope optics,"Constructing a Cassegrain Telescope"David N. Whiteman, Demetrius Venable, Eduardo Landulfo. (2011) "Comments on “Accuracy of Raman lidar water vapor calibration and its applicabilityto long-term measurements” Applied Optics 50, 2170. Online publication date: 20-May-2011 laser design, ultrashort pulse lasers, eye models,http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/OpticalModelOfTheHumanEye/ " Optica Human Eye Model", solar concentrators and Ring Imaging CHerenkov (RICH) particle detectors.A. Petrolini, RICH1 and the LHCb/RICH upgrade: re-optimization of the optics; LHCb-PUB-2013-012; CERN-LHCb-PUB-2013-012.
History Optica was originally developed by Donald Barnhart of Urbana, Illinois, USA, and has been in continual development since 1994. Wolfram Research first sold the original version as a Mathematica application."ScientificWeb" From 2005 to 2009, Optica Software was sold by iCyt Mission Technology Inc, Champaign, Illinois (renamed Sony Biotechnology Inc in 2010). At iCyt, Optica2 was renamed as Rayica, and Wavica and LensLab were also developed. Later Rayica-Wavica was combined and named back to Optica3. Since 2009, Optica Software has been a subsidiary of Barnhart Optical Research LLC.
References
External links Optica Software Website Wolfram Research Optics Page Wolfram Research Optica3