Polarized Light and Optical Design

Level: Intermediate Length: 7 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: This is an intermediate level class is intended for educators, students, lens designers, optical engineers, scientists, and managers who need to understand and apply polarization concepts to optical systems. Prior exposure to optical design programs, polarization, and to linear algebra would be helpful. Description: Polarized Light and Optical Systems surveys polarization effects in optical systems and their simulation by polarization ray tracing. For many optical systems, selecting good combinations of polarization elements is very difficult, requiring man-years of dedicated polarization engineering. Polarization critical optical systems, such as liquid crystal displays, VR and AR optics, and microlithography, present polarization challenges with difficult specifications. Polarization engineering is the task of designing, fabricating, testing, and mass producing with high yield, such polarization critical optical systems. Surveying the fundamentals of polarized light and properties of polarization elements, provides a foundation for understanding polarization ray tracing, simulating the nearly spherical waves in imaging systems to model the large set of polarization effects which occur: polarization elements, Fresnel equations, thin films, anisotropic materials, polarizing films, diffractive optical elements, stress birefringence, and thin films. The resulting polarization aberrations adversely affect the point spread function/matrix and optical transfer function/matrix of image forming optical systems. Polarization ray tracing examples include systems with retarders, crystal polarizers, vortex retarders, stress birefringence, fold mirrors, and lenses. Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - describe fundamentals of polarized light and polarization elements in optical systems - explain Jones and Mueller calculus - classify Fresnel aberrations, and thin films polarization aberrations - describe image formation with polarization aberrations - describe polarization of diffractive optical elements, gratings and wire grid polarizers - analyze stress birefringence - explain wide angle films for angle compensation in liquid crystal cells Instructor(s): Russell A. Chipman is an Optical Technologist at Meta Inc. and Emeritus Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. He received his BS in Physics from MIT and MS and Ph. D. in Optical Science from the University of Arizona. He is a Fellow of OSA and SPIE. He received SPIE’s 2007 G. G. Stokes award for research in Polarimetry and OSA’s Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert Burley Award for Optical Engineering in 2015. He helped found Airy Optics Inc. and Axometrics Inc. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2025 Course Held: 26 January 2025