Generalized Paraxial Ray Trace Procedure Derived from Geodesic Deviation

Paraxial ray tracing procedures have become widely accepted techniques for acoustic models in seismology and underwater acoustics. To date a generic form of these procedures including fluid motion and time dependence has not appeared in the literature. A detailed investigation of the characteristic curves of the equations of hydrodynamics allows for an immediate generalization of the procedure to be extracted from the equation form geodesic deviation. The general paraxial ray trace equations serve as an ideal supplement to ordinary ray tracing in predicting the deformation of acoustic beams in random environments. The general procedure is derived in terms of affine parameterization and in a coordinate time parameterization ideal for application to physical acoustic ray propagation. The formalism is applied to layered media, where the deviation equation reduces to a second order differential equation for a single field with a general solution in terms of a depth integral along the ray path. Some features are illustrated through special cases which lead to exact solutions in terms of either ordinary or special functions.Comment: Original; 40 pages (double spaced), 1 figure Replaced version; 36 pages single spaced, 7 figures. Expanded content; Complete derivation of the equations from the equations of hydrodynamics, introduction of an auxiliary basis for three dimensional wave-front modeling. Typos in text and equations correcte

Poke: An open-source ray-based physical optics platform

Integrated optical models allow for accurate prediction of the as-built performance of an optical instrument. Optical models are typically composed of a separate ray trace and diffraction model to capture both the geometrical and physical regimes of light. These models are typically separated across both open-source and commercial software that don't interface with each other directly. To bridge the gap between ray trace models and diffraction models, we have built an open-source optical analysis platform in Python called Poke that uses commercial ray tracing APIs and open-source physical optics engines to simultaneously model scalar wavefront error, diffraction, and polarization. Poke operates by storing ray data from a commercial ray tracing engine into a Python object, from which physical optics calculations can be made. We present an introduction to using Poke, and highlight the capabilities of two new propagation physics modules that add to the utility of existing scalar diffraction models. Gaussian Beamlet Decomposition is a ray-based approach to diffraction modeling that allows us to integrate physical optics models with ray trace models to directly capture the influence of ray aberrations in diffraction simulations. Polarization Ray Tracing is a ray-based method of vector field propagation that can diagnose the polarization aberrations in optical systems. Poke has been recently used to study the next generation of astronomical observatories, including the ground-based Extremely Large Telescopes and a 6 meter space telescope early concept for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory.Comment: 11 Pages, 9 Figures, Published in Proceedings of SPIE Optical Modeling and Performance Predictions XIII Paper 12664-

McStas (i): Introduction, use, and basic principles for ray-tracing simulations

We present an overview of, and an introduction to, the general-purpose neutron simulation package McStas. We present the basic principles behind Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulations of neutrons performed in the package and present a few simple examples. We present the implementation of McStas, the status of the package and its use in the neutron community. Finally, we briefly discuss the planned development of the package.Comment: 4 figure

Inverse Methods In Freeform Optics

Traditional methods in optical design like ray tracing suffer from slow convergence and are not constructive, i.e., each minimal perturbation of input parameters might lead to “chaotic” changes in the output. However, so-called inverse methods can be helpful in designing optical systems of reflectors and lenses. The equations in R2 become ordinary differential equations, while in R3 the equations become partial differential equations. These equations are then used to transform source distributions into target distributions, where the distributions are arbitrary, though assumed to be positive and integrable. In this project, we derive the governing equations and solve them numerically, for the systems presented by our instructor Martijn Anthonissen [Anthonissen et al. 2021]. Additionally, we show how point sources can be derived as a special case of a interval source with di- rected source interval, i.e., with each point in the source interval there is also an associated unit direction vector which could be derived from a system of two interval sources in R2. This way, it is shown that connecting source distributions with target distributions can be classified into two instead of three categories. The resulting description of point sources as a source along an interval with directed rays could potentially be extended to three dimensions, leading to interpretations of point sources as directed sources on convex or star-shaped sets.:1 Abstract 4 2 Notation And Conventions 4 3 Introduction 5 4 ECMI Modeling Week Challenges 5 4.1 Problem 1 - Parallel to Near-Field Target 5 4.1.1 Description 5 4.1.2 Deriving The Equations 5 4.2 Problem 2 - Parallel Source To Two Targets 8 4.3 Problem 3 - Point Source To Near-Field Target 9 4.3.1 Deriving The Equations 9 4.4 Problem 4 - Point Source To Two Targets 11 5 Validation - Ray tracing 13 5.1 Splines 13 5.1.1 Piece-Wise Affine Reflectors 13 5.1.2 Piece-Wise Cubic Reflectors 14 5.2 Error Estimates For Spline Reflectors 14 5.2.1 Lemma: A Priori Feasibility Of Starting Values For Near-Field Problems 15 5.2.2 Estimates for single reflector, near-field targets 16 5.3 Ray Tracing Errors - Illumination Errors 17 5.3.1 Definition: Axioms For Errors 18 5.3.2 Extrapolated Ray Tracing Error (ERTE) 18 5.3.3 Definition: Minimal Distance Ray Tracing Error (MIRTE) 19 5.3.4 Lemma: Continuity Of The Ray Traced Reflection Projection Of Smooth Reflectors 19 5.3.5 Theorem: Convergence Of The MIRTE 20 5.3.6 Convergence Of The ERTE 21 5.3.7 Application 21 6 Numerical Implementation 21 6.1 The DOPTICS Library 21 6.2 Pseudocode Of The Implementation 21 6.2.1 Solutions Of The Problems 22 6.2.2 Ray Tracing And Ray Tracing Error 22 6.3 ERTE Implementation 25 7 Results 26 7.1 Problem 1: Results 26 7.2 Problem 2: Results 26 7.3 Problem 3: Results 27 7.4 Problem 4: Results 27 8 Generalizations In Two Dimensions 29 8.1 Directed Densities 29 8.2 Generalized, Orthogonally Emitting Sources in R2 30 8.2.1 Point Light Sources As Orthogonally Emitting Sources 30 9 Conclusion and Future Research 32 10 Group Dynamic 32 References 3

Single freeform surface design for prescribed input wavefront and target irradiance

In beam shaping applications, the minimization of the number of necessary optical elements for the beam shaping process can benefit the compactness of the optical system and reduce its cost. The single freeform surface design for input wavefronts, which are neither planar nor spherical, is therefore of interest. In this work, the design of single freeform surfaces for a given zero-\'etendue source and complex target irradiances is investigated. Hence, not only collimated input beams or point sources are assumed. Instead, a predefined input ray direction vector field and irradiance distribution on a source plane, which has to be redistributed by a single freeform surface to give the predefined target irradiance, is considered. To solve this design problem, a partial differential equation (PDE) or PDE system, respectively, for the unknown surface and its corresponding ray mapping is derived from energy conservation and the ray-tracing equations. In contrast to former PDE formulations of the single freeform design problem, the derived PDE of Monge-Amp\`ere type is formulated for general zero-\'etendue sources in cartesian coordinates. The PDE system is discretized with finite differences and the resulting nonlinear equation system solved by a root-finding algorithm. The basis of the efficient solution of the PDE system builds the introduction of an initial iterate constuction approach for a given input direction vector field, which uses optimal mass transport with a quadratic cost function. After a detailed description of the numerical algorithm, the efficiency of the design method is demonstrated by applying it to several design examples. This includes the redistribution of a collimated input beam beyond the paraxial approximation, the shaping of point source radiation and the shaping of an astigmatic input wavefront into a complex target irradiance distribution.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures version 2: Equation (7) was corrected; additional minor changes/improvement

Fast Ray Tracing Techniques

In the past, ray tracing has been used widely in offline rendering applications since it provided the ability to better capture high quality secondary effects such as reflection, refraction and shadows. Such effects are difficult to produce in a robust, high quality fashion with traditional, real-time rasterization algorithms. Motivated to bring the advantages to ray tracing to real-time applications, researchers have developed better and more efficient algorithms that leverage the current generation of fast, parallel CPU hardware within the past few years. This thesis provides the implementation and design details of a high performance ray tracing solution called ``RTTest'' for standard, desktop CPUs. Background information on various algorithms and acceleration structures are first discussed followed by an introduction to novel techniques used to better accelerate current, core ray tracing techniques. Techniques such as Omni-Directional Packets, Cone Proxy Traversal and Multiple Frustum Traversal are proposed and benchmarked using standard ray tracing scenes. Also, a novel soft shadowing algorithm called Edge Width Soft Shadows is proposed which achieves performance comparable to a single sampled hard shadow approach targeted at real time applications such as games. Finally, additional information on the memory layout, rendering pipeline, shader system and code level optimizations of RTTest are also discussed

Hardware Accelerators for Animated Ray Tracing

Future graphics processors are likely to incorporate hardware accelerators for real-time ray tracing, in order to render increasingly complex lighting effects in interactive applications. However, ray tracing poses difficulties when drawing scenes with dynamic content, such as animated characters and objects. In dynamic scenes, the spatial datastructures used to accelerate ray tracing are invalidated on each animation frame, and need to be rapidly updated. Tree update is a complex subtask in its own right, and becomes highly expensive in complex scenes. Both ray tracing and tree update are highly memory-intensive tasks, and rendering systems are increasingly bandwidth-limited, so research on accelerator hardware has focused on architectural techniques to optimize away off-chip memory traffic. Dynamic scene support is further complicated by the recent introduction of compressed trees, which use low-precision numbers for storage and computation. Such compression reduces both the arithmetic and memory bandwidth cost of ray tracing, but adds to the complexity of tree update.This thesis proposes methods to cope with dynamic scenes in hardware-accelerated ray tracing, with focus on reducing traffic to external memory. Firstly, a hardware architecture is designed for linear bounding volume hierarchy construction, an algorithm which is a basic building block in most state-of-the-art software tree builders. The algorithm is rearranged into a streaming form which reduces traffic to one-third of software implementations of the same algorithm. Secondly, an algorithm is proposed for compressing bounding volume hierarchies in a streaming manner as they are output from a hardware builder, instead of performing compression as a postprocessing pass. As a result, with the proposed method, compression reduces the overall cost of tree update rather than increasing it. The last main contribution of this thesis is an evaluation of shallow bounding volume hierarchies, common in software ray tracing, for use in hardware pipelines. These are found to be more energy-efficient than binary hierarchies. The results in this thesis both confirm that dynamic scene support may become a bottleneck in real time ray tracing, and add to the state of the art on tree update in terms of energy-efficiency, as well as the complexity of scenes that can be handled in real time on resource-constrained platforms

TransFit: Finite element analysis data fitting software

The Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) mission support team has made extensive use of geometric ray tracing to analyze the performance of AXAF developmental and flight optics. One important aspect of this performance modeling is the incorporation of finite element analysis (FEA) data into the surface deformations of the optical elements. TransFit is software designed for the fitting of FEA data of Wolter I optical surface distortions with a continuous surface description which can then be used by SAO's analytic ray tracing software, currently OSAC (Optical Surface Analysis Code). The improved capabilities of Transfit over previous methods include bicubic spline fitting of FEA data to accommodate higher spatial frequency distortions, fitted data visualization for assessing the quality of fit, the ability to accommodate input data from three FEA codes plus other standard formats, and options for alignment of the model coordinate system with the ray trace coordinate system. TransFit uses the AnswerGarden graphical user interface (GUI) to edit input parameters and then access routines written in PV-WAVE, C, and FORTRAN to allow the user to interactively create, evaluate, and modify the fit. The topics covered include an introduction to TransFit: requirements, designs philosophy, and implementation; design specifics: modules, parameters, fitting algorithms, and data displays; a procedural example; verification of performance; future work; and appendices on online help and ray trace results of the verification section