Two new femtoPro papers published

We are pleased to announce the publication of our paper entitled femtoPro: real-time linear and nonlinear optics calculations in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B. You can also find the article on arXiv here. Our paper was also recently featured in Spotlight on Optics, which highlights only two articles from each Optica journal every month.

In our paper, we provide a complete description of the underlying physical and mathematical model of femtoPro and demonstrate the physical consistency of the model by performing a virtual frequency-resolved optical gating experiment. The paper includes all the fundamental equations, approximations and analytical and numerical methods to describe and simulate, for example:

• Gaussian pulse propagation and beam visualization,
• spatiotemporal overlap and spatial modulation of Gaussian beams,
• nonresonant response, dispersive media and linear resonant response,
• multi-pulse interference,
• nonlinear signal beam generation.

How do we achieve a high framerate during all calculation processes?

It is indeed challenging to balance physical accuracy and computational efficiency in view of the limited hardware of virtual-reality headsets. We answer this question in another publication in the journal Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory. Our paper A graph-based laser path solver algorithm for virtual reality laboratory simulations details the concept and the implementation of a dynamic graph-based solution strategy to optimize resource usage and to avoid unncessary recalculations during program runtime. The paper is also available on arXiv.

We hope that the detailed documentation we provide will make femtoPro useful not only as an interactive training and education tool, but also as a reference for those interested in modeling real-world ultrafast experiments. 

What happens next?

We are currently working on a femtoPro update that will introduce new features such as progress saving, pulse shaping, new tutorials, and further improvements.