PAOS, the Physical Optics Simulator, is a fast, modern, and reliable Python package for Physical Optics studies.

It implements Physical Optics Propagation in Fresnel approximation and paraxial ray tracing to analyze complex waveform propagation through both generic and off-axes optical systems.

It handles diffractive materials and can implement wavefront aberrations as Zernike polynomials, orthonormal polynomials, or grid sags.

• PAOS
  • Introduction
  • Table of contents
  • How to install
    • Install from PyPI
    • Install from source code
      • Test your installation
    • Interactive Marimo Notebooks
  • Documentation
    • Build the html documentation
    • Build the pdf documentation
  • How to contribute
  • How to cite

Instructions on how to install PAOS.

PAOS is available on PyPI and can be installed via pip as

pip install paos

PAOS is compatible (tested) with Python 3.9+

To install from source, clone the repository and move inside the directory.

Then use pip as

pip install .

Try importing PAOS as

python -c "import paos; print(paos.__version__)"

Or running PAOS itself with the help flag as

paos -h

Or the Graphical User Interface with the help flag as

paos_gui -h

If there are no errors then the installation was successful!

PAOS provides interactive marimo notebooks to showcase (some of) its capabilities. These notebooks allow you to explore PAOS features in a live, browser-based environment.

Available marimo notebooks:

• notebook/paos_demo.py
• notebook/material.py
• notebook/psd.py

Note: These notebooks are available only in PAOS version 1.2.6 and later.

How to run a marimo notebook:

After installing PAOS, marimo is already available.

To launch a notebook (for example):

marimo run notebook/paos_demo.py

This will open the interactive notebook in your browser.

PAOS comes with an extensive documentation, which can be built using Sphinx. The documentation includes a tutorial, a user guide and a reference guide.

To build the documentation, install the needed packages first via poetry:

pip install poetry
poetry install --with docs

To build the html documentation, move into the docs directory and run

make html

The documentation will be produced into the build/html directory inside docs. Open index.html to read the documentation.

To build the pdf, move into the docs directory and run

make latexpdf

The documentation will be produced into the build/latex directory inside docs. Open paos.pdf to read the documentation.

The developers use pdflatex; if you have another compiler for LaTex, please refer to sphinx documentation.

You can contribute to PAOS by reporting bugs, suggesting new features, or contributing to the code itself. If you wish to contribute to the code, please follow the steps described in the documentation under Developer Guide.

@INPROCEEDINGS{2024SPIE13092E..4KB,
       author = {{Bocchieri}, Andrea and {Mugnai}, Lorenzo V. and {Pascale}, Enzo},
        title = "{PAOS: a fast, modern, and reliable Python package for physical optics studies}",
    booktitle = {Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2024: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave},
         year = 2024,
       editor = {{Coyle}, Laura E. and {Matsuura}, Shuji and {Perrin}, Marshall D.},
       series = {Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference Series},
       volume = {13092},
        month = aug,
          eid = {130924K},
        pages = {130924K},
          doi = {10.1117/12.3018333},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024SPIE13092E..4KB},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}