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Glass and Plastics

Normal homogeneous glasses, plastics, liquids and gases used as optical media are all stored in various glass catalogs in Zemax. Some catalogs are organized by vendors (Schott, Ohara etc.), some by wavelength range (infrared materials), some by intended use (radiation hardened glasses), etc. In addition, you can create your own catalogs and glasses easily to manage the optical materials you use.

Dispersion formulae (like the Schott, Sellmeier, Conrady etc formulae) are used to define the refractive index of a material as a function of wavelength.

A typical glass catalog entry

A TABLE glass definition file allows direct entry of wavelength-refractive index data pairs without the use of dispersion formulae. A model glass is also available for use with older methods of glass selection like Conrady d-D.

Thermal data is also entered via the Glass Catalog, as is glass transmission data, and other data like cost, climate resistance, stain resistance, and acid, alkali and phosphate resistance. Here is some of the data stored for N-BALF4
from Schott:

$Refractive index versus wavelength$

Internal transmission of the glass versus wavelength