A Fast Ray Tracing Method in Phase Space

Abstract

Ray tracing is a widely used method in geometric optics to simulate the propagation of light through a non-imaging optical system. We present a new ray tracing approach based on the source and the target phase space (PS) representation of two-dimensional optical systems. The new PS method allows tracing far fewer rays through the system compared to the classical ray tracing approach. The efficiency of the PS method is demonstrated by numerical simulations that compare the new approach with Monte Carlo (MC) ray tracing. The results show that the PS method is very accurate and much faster than MC.