Abstract

The angle-impact Wigner function (AIWF) is a tool that assigns weights to rays in a way such that ray tracing can be used to exactly model the irradiance and polarization properties of nonparaxial, partially coherent, partially polarized electromagnetic fields. Although the AIWF offers computational advantages over more conventional wave propagation integrals, in practice, the large number of rays that must be traced has proved to be a significant bottleneck. We demonstrate an efficient method to implement AIWF propagation algorithms inspired by a plenoptic field representation. We illustrate the method by computing irradiance and polarization properties of several paraxial and nonparaxial fields.

© 2019 Optical Society of America

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