General Ray-Tracing Procedure†

1962/06/01 by Gordon Spencer, M. V. R. K. Murty · 1 voice
Engineering · #Optical Polarization and Ellipsometry #Photonic and Optical Devices #Surface Roughness and Optical Measurements

paper · doi:10.1364/josa.52.000672

openalex publication_date 1962/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26

Abstract

Computing formulas are presented for tracing skew rays through optical systems containing cylindrical and toric surfaces of arbitrary orientation and position. Particular attention is given to the treatment of diffraction gratings and a vector form of the diffraction law is suggested.

Citations

• Optical Calculations with Automatic Computing Machinery*

Discussions

• The 3D ray trace algorithm is the same one as described here: doi.org/10.1364/JOSA... The paraxial ray tracer is using vanilla ABCD matrices. [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]