Nowadays optical systems consist of many different optical elements such as lenses, aspheric surfaces, and mirrors, and also waveguides, diffractive optical elements, etc. Although all these elements can in principle be described by Maxwell’s equations; As such, practical simulation of optical systems requires many different approximate methods and their combination a direct solution is only possible analytically for a few simple cases or numerically for relatively small elements.

Therefore, the research in the Lindlein group mainly focusses on the simulation and design of optical systems by using, for example, ray tracing for aberration calculations and incoherent illumination systems, wave-optical scalar simulation methods for calculating diffraction problems or waveguides, or a vectorial formulation of the Debye integral for calculating the electromagnetic field in the vicinity of the focal region including polarization effects.

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