Who is the Finesse Team

Finesse has been developed with the help of many people over more than 25 years. We are very grateful to everyone who has improved Finesse by contributing code, bug reports, documentation, training and support for students and input on the design, features, and the future development of the software.

In 2017 Daniel Brown and Andreas Freise started Finesse 3, a re-implementation of Finesse in Python, with the idea to provide a modern and clean code base that makes further developing and extending the software simpler, especially for external contributors. The goal was to merge the established features and reliability of Finesse with a modular and hackable object based design, and to add some cool new features in the process!

The further development of Finesse 3 continued with a growing number of key contributors, and we expect to attract many more along the way.

Core Finesse 3 development:

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Andreas Freise, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Nikhef: Project lead, original author of Finesse, its manual and related papers.

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Anna Green, Maastricht University and Nikhef: …

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Daniel Brown, University of Adelaide: Project and programming lead for Finesse 3, lead developer for Finesse 2 and Pykat.

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Miron van der Kolk, Nikhef: Core developer. Development of polarisation features as well as maintenance and improvements to Finesse on all fronts.

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Jéremié Gobeil, Nikhef: Core developer.

Previous members of the Core Finesse3 team:

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Samuel Rowlinson, University of Birmingham: Developer with key contributions to the beam tracing, higher-order modes features, integration with Cython, the code structure and design, and the Sphinx documentation.

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Philip Jones, University of Birmingham: Developer with key contributions to the quantum noise implementation, signal and noise features, the legacy parser, and the external Jupyter and Pygments extensions.

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Sean Leavey, Albert-Einstein-Institute Hannover: Developer with key contributions to the new KatScript syntax, parser and command line interface, test suite, continuous integration tooling, the code structure and design, and the documentation.

Contributors to the Finesse 3 development

Further contributors to the Finesse 3 code are listed below. Other contributions to earlier versions are described in the History section.

  • Luise Kranzhoff, University Maastricht and Nikhef

  • Timo Marchand, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Nikhef

  • Emma Prins, University Maastricht and Nikhef

  • Alina Soflau, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Nikhef

  • Yashwant Bothra, Nikhef

  • Jasmijn Stevens, Nikhef

  • Mischa Sallé, Nikhef

  • Kevin Kuns, MIT, LIGO and Cosmic Explorer: Contributions on new tests, bug fixes, and harrassing project lead and programming lead for new features and user interface improvements.

  • Aaron Jones, University of Western Australia: developer with key contributions to the test suite, Finesse validation, documentation and continous integration. Primary developer of the BrumSoftTest validation tool, which was developed for Finesse validation.

  • Jan Just Keijser, Nikhef

  • Duncan Macleod, Cardiff University: Conda packaging, Windows fixes

  • Alexei Ciobanu, University of Adelaide: faster map integration code

  • Lee McCuller, Caltech

  • Huy Tuong Cao, University of Adelaide: testing of thermal effects and FEA comparisons

  • Paul Hapke, Albert-Einstein-Institute Hannover

To find out about contributions to previous versions of Finesse, see the History page.