Can find group velocity and group velocity dispersion of ray as it propagates through optical components with temporal dispersion. Can model prisms and grating pulse shapers. Optical setups can be saved in files, and retrieved over the web, so that HTML pages with lessons can be created, with accompanying Optical Table lessons. Will eventually come with copious documentation and prewritten lessons to help educators adapt Optical Table to their curricula. Optical Table is distributed under the GNU General Public License .
Comments are always welcome also.
Also we would like to acknowledge the Optical Society of America for providing us with a Student Activity Grant for 1998 to continue work on Optical Table. Symantec has also donated a copy of Visual Cafe so that we can release a precompiled x86 executable of Optical Table. We do not speak for the Optical Society of America, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology. Educators and other users are urged to critically evaluate the software before using it in a classroom environment. We plan to offer the contents as a ZIP file, and possible as a TAR file for UNIX workstations.