zmitchell / polsim

A command line utility for doing polarization simulations

polsim

For installation and usage instructions, see the User Guide.

Elevator Pitch

Would you rather look up (or calculate) the Jones matrix for an optical retarder oriented at an arbitrary angle with an arbitrary phase delay, or would you rather just type this:

[[elements]]
element_type = "retarder"
phase = 1.57  # pi/2
phase_units = "radians"
angle = 45.0
angle_units = "degrees"

About

Here's how it works:

• You specify a beam and some optical elements in a TOML file.
• The command line utility reads the file and performs the simulation.
• The results of the simulation are printed to the terminal.

For example, to specify a linearly polarized beam oriented at 0 degrees (i.e. horizontally) that passes through a polarizer oriented at 45 degrees, your file would look like this:

# simulation.toml
[beam]
polarization = "linear"
angle = 0.0
angle_units = "degrees"

[[elements]]
element_type = "polarizer"
angle = 45.0
angle_units = "degrees"

You would use polsim to read the file and do the simulation like this:

$ polsim simulation.toml
intensity: 5.00000e-1
x_mag: 5.00000e-1
x_phase: 0.00000e0
y_mag: 5.00000e-1
y_phase: 0.00000e0

If you want to impress your friends and family, you can print the results in a table via the -p/--pretty flag:

$ polsim -p simulation.toml
+------------+------------+-----------+------------+-----------+
| intensity  | x_mag      | x_phase   | y_mag      | y_phase   |
+------------+------------+-----------+------------+-----------+
| 5.00000e-1 | 5.00000e-1 | 0.00000e0 | 5.00000e-1 | 0.00000e0 |
+------------+------------+-----------+------------+-----------+

For more information, see the User Guide.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.