Applications for a general purpose optical beam propagation code

Real world beam propagation and diffraction problems can rarely be solved by the analytical expressions commonly found in optics and lasers textbooks. These equations are typically valid only for paraxial geometries, for specific boundary conditions (e.g., infinite apertures), or for special assumptions (e.g., at focus). Numerical techniques must be used to solve the equations for the general case. LOTS, a public domain numerical beam propagation software package developed for this purpose, is a widely used and proven tool. The graphical presentation of results combined with a well designed command language make LOTS particularly user-friendly, and the recent implementation of LOTS on the IBM PC/XT family of desktop computes will make this capability available to a much larger group of users. This paper surveys several applications demonstrating the need for such a capability