polsim is a command line tool for quickly doing polarization simulations with Jones calculus. Jones calculus allows you to compute the effect of a sequence of optical elements (polarizers, wave plates, etc) on if the initial state (intensity and polarization) is known. A beam is represented as a vector with two elements (x- and y-components), and an optical element is represented as a 2x2 matrix that operates on the beam/vector. polsim makes life easy by letting you skip the tedious work of multiplying the matrices together by hand.

Would you rather look up this matrix,

\[ \begin{bmatrix} \cos^{2}\left(\theta\right) + e^{i\varphi} \sin^{2}\left(\theta\right) & \sin\left(\theta\right)\cos\left(\theta\right) - e^{i\varphi} \sin\left(\theta\right)\cos\left(\theta\right) \\ \sin\left(\theta\right)\cos\left(\theta\right) - e^{i\varphi} \sin\left(\theta\right)\cos\left(\theta\right) & \sin^{2}\left(\theta\right) + e^{i\varphi} \cos^{2}\left(\theta\right) \\ \end{bmatrix} \]

then plug in \(\theta = \pi/4\) and \(\varphi = \pi/2\), or would you rather write this?

[[elements]]
element_type = "retarder"
phase = 1.57  # pi/2
phase_units = "radians"
angle = 45.0
angle_units = "degrees"

polsim is really just a pretty face for the simulation library I wrote, which can be found here. If you think you've found a bug in the simulation results, you should create an issue on Github. The simulation library is tested very thoroughly for correctness, but it's entirely possible that something slipped through the cracks!

If you want to do more complicated simulations (e.g. sweep the angle of a polarizer from 0 degrees to 10 degrees in 0.1 degree increments) you'll have to use the simulation library directly. I hope that you can do that directly from polsim one day, but I don't see myself having the time to work on it any time soon.

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.