The Quick Adjust Tool is invaluable in the early stages of a design. It allows you to adjust the radius of curvature or thickness of a surface to minimize the spot size, wavefront error, or angular deviation of a beam on any subsequent surface.

Imagine you were designing a beam compressor. Your starting design might look like this:

This file can be downloaded from the link at the end of this article. We want the beam to come to focus on surface 4, and then to be collimated again on surface 7. We will use the Quick Adjust Tool to get a starting point for subsequent optimization.

Click on the radius of surface 3, and then click on Tools -> Miscellaneous -> Quick Adjust.



The Quick Adjust Tool opens, and is already set to adjust the radius of surface 3.  Set the Criterion to "spot size" and the Evaluation Surface to surface 4, and press Adjust:



We now have an intermediate focus. Then set the tool to Adjust the radius of surface 6, for smallest angular radius on surface 7:



and we now have a starting point system, suitable for further optimization or analysis:



The Quick Adjust tool has many useful properties:

• It remains open on the ZEMAX desktop while you enter data in the editors, open Analysis windows etc
• You can have more than one Quick Adjust Tool open at a time
• It works in both focal and afocal modes
• It allows adjustment of radius of curvature and thickness only: other parameters, like aspheric adjustments etc are not suitable for "quick adjust" and should be optimized instead
• You can add it to the button bar for one-click access. Click on File...Preferences, select the range of button bars you want to use and enter it like so: