Thomas Houllier

• PhD
• R&D Engineer at Sophia Engineering

We design a TMA telescope for nanosat uncooled IR applications and manufacture one of its mirror using a ceramic 3D printing process. The TMA design serves as pretext to obtaining a very fast (N = 0.63) mirror to manufacture, we nonetheless gloss over a typical optical design workflow, with optical optimization, tolerancing and stray-light analysis...

Five search algorithms from the literature of black-box optimization were implemented and applied to optical design problems. These algorithms are the Particle Swarm Optimization, Gravity Search Algorithm, Cuckoo Search, Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy and Nelder&Mead Simplex search. The performance of these search algorithms’ imple...

Presentation about search algorithms applied to optical systems design.

Hypertelescopes are large optical interferometric arrays, employing many small mirrors and a miniature pupildensifier before the focal camera, expected to produce direct images of celestial sources at high resolution. Their peculiar imaging properties, initially explored through analytical derivations, had been verified with simulations before test...

A recently developed color printing system on glass plates, based on dot-by-dot laser irradiation generating the growth of metallic nanoparticles in a special coating, produces structural colors depending strongly on the illumination and observation configuration. The difficulty for an exhaustive color characterization of the printing technology co...

This paper studies distinct features between optimization of conventional and freeform optical systems. Freeform optical systems include lens or mirror surfaces with shapes that have no axis of revolution to reach better performance in off-axis designs. They have an increased number of design parameters compared to classical rotationally symmetrica...

Freeform optical systems include lens or mirror surfaces with shapes that have no axis of revolution in order to reach better performance in off-axis designs such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMD). They have an increased number of design parameters compared to rotationally symmetrical optical systems which makes their optimization more difficult. In t...

This research work treats the subjects of simulation, automatic design and metrology of freeform imaging optical systems. Starting from an example of freeform unobscured space telescope design, we identified two challenges that are implied or amplified by the introduction of freeform optics: firstly the efficiency of computer-assisted optical desig...

PhD Oral Defense

This paper presents the modified global optimization co-algorithm based on the Mind Evolutionary Computation (MEC) algorithm for optimizing optical system designs. This kind of systems requires high precision. As a result optimization algorithms tend to converge slowly to a local optimum while trying to guarantee high quality of solutions. The conc...

Hypertelescope interferometers having many highly diluted sub-apertures are capable of directly imaging, within a narrow field of view, celestial objects at a high resolution thanks to pupil densification. This Letter verifies with OpticStudio modeling the possibility of simultaneously imaging multiple such fields. A strategy of multi-field samplin...

We want to acknowledge prior research with a very similar focus to our own which we failed to discover before the publication of our paper.

Hypertelescopes are large optical interferometric arrays, employing many small mirrors and a miniature pupildensifier before the focal camera, expected to produce direct images of celestial sources at high resolution. Their peculiar imaging properties, initially explored through analytical derivations, had been verified with simulations before test...