Welcome

Greetings from our new Optica website and my first Blog post!

As I write these words, my research collaborator Dr David Hayes is putting the finishing touches on a new package for Optica/Mathematica that extends Optica's capabilities to include full-scale electro-magnetic simulations of optical systems!

David has recently retired from Plasma Antennas (a company which he co-founded) that produces microwave feed-antenna devices. Today, after using Optica for 18 years to help his business create electro-magnetic field simulations at 60-100 GHz, David is working with me to develop a new add-on package for Optica that simulates the EM behavior of both free-space and waveguide systems at optical wavelengths. This translates to frequencies that are a million times higher than David's previous work!

Already, David has tested his new code to model a diverse range of examples in both optical and microwave frequencies. Some examples include: axicon-lens focal regions, the frequency response of Echelle gratings, the near-field and far-field responses of computer generated diffractive optics, and the design of nano-structures on optical surfaces to enable antireflection, taylored refraction, and taylored reflective behaviors. Soon he will be testing light field optics for augmented reality and three-dimensional sensing!

Next, David will start publishing a series of short video tutorials on this website to show everyone how the fore-mentioned topics can be modeled with this new package. (At the same time, I will be publishing a series of video tutorials here about using the standard Optica's features.)

Once it is ready, we plan to make a special-edition of this new package available to any Optica users willing to become early adopters at special discount prices! If you are interested in becoming an early adopter, please send me an email (through the contact us page or otherwise) to get notified as soon as it is ready!

Finally, you may have noticed that I have not disclosed a name for this new package... that is because we have not given it a new name yet! Therefore, here is your chance to help us and become famous at the same time by coming up with our package's new name!

Otherwise, we might just do what Steve Jobs did with his first company ... by using the name of a fruit!

Thank you,

Donald