OpticsBase.jl

A minimal interface package for coupling optical solvers in Julia. Every solver of the ecosystem, whether it traces beamlets, runs a BPM, sums an angular spectrum or solves Maxwell's equations on a mesh, is a solution of Maxwell's equations. They exchange one thing: a PlaneField, the tangential electric and magnetic field sampled on a plane in 3D space.

struct PlaneField{T, A}
    E::A          # nx × ny × 2: (Eu, Ev) in V/m
    H::A          # nx × ny × 2: (Hu, Hv) in A/m
    spacing       # (Δu, Δv) in m
    origin        # plane center, global frame
    axes          # columns u, v, n (right-handed, n = positive normal)
    λ             # vacuum wavelength
    n             # refractive index at the plane
    R             # radius of the reference sphere (Inf = none)
end

By the surface equivalence theorem, tangential E and H on a plane determine the field on both sides of it, so the format covers one-way and bidirectional solvers alike. Five functions come with it: coordinates, reference_phase, power (Poynting flux), forward and backward.

Solvers couple by function composition. A package offers methods that return a PlaneField and methods that take one:

f1 = PlaneField(detector; size = (256, 256), spacing = (0.25e-6, 0.25e-6))  # BeamletOptics
f2, stats = propagate(f1, fiber, FDBPM(dz = 1e-6); grid)                   # BeamletFibers
src = WavefrontBeamletDecomposition(f2)                                     # BeamletOptics

OpticsBase.Conformance is a shared test suite: a package runs it against its own sources and propagators, which compares their fields with analytic Gaussian beams, including the absolute phase.

There is no solver interface, no trait system and no converter registry. The glue lives in the solver packages. The binding conventions (SI units, exp(−iωt), peak amplitudes, frames, sampling, phase reference) are on the Conventions page.

Installation

OpticsBase is installed from the General registry:

using Pkg
Pkg.add("OpticsBase")

See the documentation for the reference and the conformance tests.

Status: early development, the API is not stable yet.