Using the bench
Glass & materials
A material in Photonica is a dispersion curve, not a colour. That is what makes the measurements mean anything.
Built-in materials
Eighteen presets ship with the app, each with real published dispersion data:
| Group | Materials |
|---|---|
| Common glass | BK7, Crown Glass, Flint Glass, Dense Flint SF11, Fused Silica |
| Crystals & exotics | Fluorite CaF₂, Sapphire, Diamond, Moissanite, Cubic Zirconia, Rutile |
| Everyday | Water, Ice, Acrylic, Air |
| Coloured filters | Ruby, Emerald, Cobalt blue — absorbing glass that passes a band |
Select a part and the Build panel shows its index at 532 nm, its Abbe number, and n at 450 and 640 nm — enough to judge a glass at a glance.
Loading a real catalogue
Load AGF… imports any Zemax glass catalogue (.agf) — the same files Schott, Ohara and Hoya publish. Every glass in it becomes selectable with its exact Sellmeier or Schott coefficients. A sample catalogue sits in the catalogs folder next to the executable.
Custom material fields
| Field | Means |
|---|---|
| IOR (nd) | Index at the 587.6 nm d line |
| Dispersion | n_F − n_C, the spread between 486 and 656 nm. Abbe number = (nd−1)/dispersion |
| Absorption | Per-mm loss inside the glass — how dark a thick piece gets |
| Roughness | Surface scatter; 0 is optically polished |
| Transmission | A flat transmission factor per surface |
| Filter centre / width | Coloured glass: absorption is suppressed in a band around this wavelength |
Temperature
Glasses with thermal data carried in their catalogue respond to the Temperature field via dn/dT: the index shifts, and so does your focus. If a glass has no thermal data the panel says so plainly rather than pretending.
Coatings
Any part can carry a thin-film coating on all its surfaces. Pick a preset — single-layer MgF₂ AR, broadband AR, a dielectric high-reflector, a dichroic — or build a custom stack layer by layer, air side first, choosing each layer's index and thickness in nanometres. The panel then shows the resulting reflectance at 450, 550 and 650 nm.