Segmented optical systems

Creating a model of a segmented aperture optical system in Lentil doesn’t require any special treatment. The Plane object works the same with sparse or segmented amplitude, opd, and mask attributes as with monolithic ones.

When working with a segmented aperture, it can be advantageous from a performance point of view to supply a 3-dimensional segment mask when specifying a Plane’s mask attribute rather than a flattened 2-dimensional global mask , as depicted below:

This modification is not necessary to achieve accurate propagations, but can greatly improve performance. Since a wavefront is monochromatic, it can be broken into any arbitrary number of fields and recombined coherently at a later time.