This book shows how Excel — readily available on almost every computer — can be used to study photonics problems and to design, analyze, and optimize photonics applications. Excel comes with all the necessary ingredients: a full range of mathematical functions, excellent graphics and user-interface capabilities, powerful matrix calculations, and the ability to handle large data sets. Calculations and even sophisticated simulations can be set up easily without the need to learn a special programming language.
This book is for everyone who needs to use calculations to cope with photonics-related engineering or science tasks such as analyzing feasibility and performance of photonics designs for specific applications. It is also of interest to educators and students seeking to use computational models to demonstrate and/or study photonic phenomena. The book is written in such a way that readers do not need expert knowledge in photonics or in Excel programming. The presented material covers a wide range of photonics applications. It highlights their theoretical background and describes the implementation of the respective Excel models. The material is organized so readers can use it as stepping stones in developing their own models.
The book consists of six parts:
- INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE covers the photonic technologies and applications of interest.
- COMPUTATIONAL MODELS AND EXCEL gives an introduction to the various types of computational models of interest and how Excel’s functionalities can be leveraged.
- GEOMETRICAL OPTICS discusses ray tracing in refractive and gradient index materials and applications thereof.
- ELECTRO-OPTICS AND RADIOMETRY is dedicated to modeling electro-optical systems and their components.
- PHYSICAL OPTICS deals with electromagnetic waves and phenomena such as coherence, dispersion, interference, and spectrometry.
- Finally, the Appendix lists some useful VBA-code used throughout the book for controlling calculation flow and data handling.
This book is an independent publication and is neither affiliated with, nor authorized, sponsored, or approved by, Microsoft Corporation.