Optics¶

Common optical building blocks are provided for building up an optical system. Some have more detailed pages which are listed in the table of contents below.

Directional Beamsplitter¶

directional_beamsplitter¶ dbs

Represents a directional beamsplitter optical component. Connections made between ports:

Syntax:

dbs name

Required:

name: Name of newly created directional beamsplitter.

Isolator¶

isolator¶ isol

Represents an isolator optical component with a suppression factor.

Syntax:

isol name S=0.0

Required:

name: Name of newly created isolator.

S: Power suppression in dB.

Parameters¶

Name	Description	Units	Data type	Can change during simualation
S	Power suppression	None	float	✓

Lens¶

lens¶

Represents a thin lens optical component with an associated focal length.

Syntax:

lens name f=inf

Required:

name: Name of newly created lens.

Optional:

f: Focal length of the lens in metres; defaults to infinity.

Parameters¶

Name	Description	Units	Data type	Can change during simualation
f	Focal length	m	float	✓

Modulator¶

modulator¶ mod

Represents a modulator optical component with associated properties such as modulation frequency, index and order.

Syntax:

mod name f midx order=1 mod_type=pm phase=0.0 positive_only=false

Required:

name: Name of newly created modulator.

midx: Modulation index, >= 0.

Optional:

f: Frequency of the modulation (in Hz) or Frequency object.

order: Maximum order of modulations to produce. Must be 1 for amplitude modulation. Defaults to 1.

mod_type: Modulation type, either ‘am’ (amplitude modulation) or ‘pm’ (phase modulation). Defaults to ‘pm’.

phase: Relative phase of modulation (in degrees). Defaults to 0.0.

positive_only: If True, only produce positive-frequency sidebands. Defaults to False.

Parameters¶

Name	Description	Units	Data type	Can change during simualation
f	Frequency	Hz	float	✓
midx	Modulation index	None	float	✓
phase	Phase	degrees	float	✓
order	Maximum modulation order	None	int	✗
mod_type	Modulation type ('am', 'pm')	None	int	✗
positive_only	Positive only	None	bool	✗

Optical Bandpass¶

optical_bandpass¶ obp

An idealised optical bandpass filter that will transmit an optical frequency around some central frequency with a 3dB bandwidth.

Syntax:

obp name fc=0 bandwidth=1000 filter_hom=none

Required:

name: Name of element

fc: Central frequency

bandwidth: Filter 3dB bandwidth

Optional:

filter_hom: Individual higher order modes can be filtered and transmitted by setting this to a tuple of (n, m). If None then no mode filtering is done. This cannot be changed during a simulation.

Parameters¶

Name	Description	Units	Data type	Can change during simualation
fc	Central frequency	Hz	float	✓
bandwidth	Bandpass bandwidth	Hz	float	✓