intro.md

Introduction

This book represents the project documentation of OpticScenery. The goal of this project is the development of a common software platform for simulating various aspects of optical systems in a hollistic approach. It should be particular useful for simulating and designing large-size high energy / intensity systems. While there are a plethora of, mostly commercial, simulation / calculation tools available, most of them only address a specific aspect of on optical system. For example, there are tools for pure geometric optics (raytracing), the simulation of non-linear effects in material, wavefront propgation, parasitic lasing etc... Modern laser system need to take all these aspects into account which requires a repeated change of the tools and / or remodelling the optical system. This project is an approach to unify this design workflow.

This project is a task within the THRILL project. The THRILL acronym stands for Technology for High-Repetition-rate Intense Laser Laboratories and is a project funded by the European Union.

Within the THRILL project, this task (3.4) has the title "supporting calculations for system design" and is lead by GSI. The task description from the proposal is as follows:

[...] To strengthen the design decisions and later benchmark the system performance, the use of theoretical modelling is of vital importance. It exists a number of simulation tools for certain aspects of the laser chain (broadband generation, nonlinear frequency conversion and amplification, laser amplification, dispersion management, wavefront propagation, calculation of parasitic lasing, etc.) distributed among the project partners (GSI, FZU/ELI-BL, HZDR, CNRS-LULI) and in the wider community. In this task, we will gather calculations with the aim to make them accessible to the partners as well as to the wider community. For this purpose a common platform for input and output formats possibly with suitable interfaces will be developed. [...]

The project has a funding period of four years. The more specific goals and the project structure will be discussed in the following.

Note: This documentation will most probably never be a finished document but continuosly extended and modified with the progression of the project.