2013/06/12 by A. Freise, Daniel Brown, Freise, Andreas +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #Advanced Measurement and Metrology Techniques #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #Semiconductor Lasers and Optical Devices
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1306.2973
openalex publication_date 2013/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Finesse is a fast interferometer simulation program. For a given optical setup, it computes the light field amplitudes at every point in the interferometer assuming a steady state. To do so, the interferometer description is translated into a set of linear equations that are solved numerically. For convenience, a number of standard analyses can be performed automatically by the program, namely computing modulation-demodulation error signals, transfer functions, shot-noise-limited sensitivities, and beam shapes. Finesse can perform the analysis using the plane-wave approximation or Hermite-Gauss modes. The latter allows computation of the properties of optical systems like telescopes and the effects of mode matching and mirror angular positions.