Diffraction is a classic optical phenomenon accounting for light propagation. The efficient calculation of diffraction is of significant value towards the real-time prediction of light fields. The diffraction of electromagnetic (EM) waves can be cataloged into scalar diffraction and vector diffraction according to the validation of different approximation conditions. Although mathematical expressions for both optical diffraction have been presented authoritatively for ages, fundamental breakthroughs have rarely been achieved in computation algorithms. The direct integration method and fast Fourier transform (FFT) method have been developed and proved to suffer from the limits of either low efficiency or poor flexibility. Therefore, the versatile computation of optical diffraction in an efficient and flexible fashion is highly demanded.
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Source: Phys.org