FREE-SPACE BEAM-PROPAGATION BETWEEN ARBITRARILY ORIENTED PLANES BASEDON FULL DIFFRACTION THEORY - A FAST FOURIER-TRANSFORM APPROACH

A fast and accurate numerical method for free-space beam propagation b etween arbitrarily oriented planes is developed. The only approximatio n made in the development of the method was that the vector nature of light was ignored. The method is based on evaluating the Rayleigh-Somm erfeld diffraction integral by use of the fast Fourier transform with a special transformation to handle tilts and offsets of planes. The fu ndamental aspects of a software package based on the developed method are presented. A numerical example realized with the software package is presented to establish the validity of the method. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.