RayJack ONE - Finding Unlikely Ray Paths

Finding Unlikely Ray Paths in RayJack ONE®

Consider a mirror cabinet consisting of three curved mirrors, illuminated by a point source. Only a small fraction of light will finally hit the small detector behind the last mirror.

This simple optical system mimics a typical situation in stray light analysis, where light paths are often “unlikely” meaning that only a very few rays follow it. Normally this causes large statistical errors in the results or excessively long simulation times. But there is a smarter solution …

RayJack ONE®’s path finder tool allows you to find as many rays for a given path as you want. It iteratively searches for rays connecting a sequence of objects until the rays finally hit the detector. And differential ray tracing ensures noise-free results.

The picture shows a ray trace through the system along with the irradiance distribution and optical path length map on the detector.