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:

Let's say you were interested in how the wavefront of the beam compressor varies as the distance from the first lens to the intermediate surface varies. In other words, as we go out of focus on the intermediate focus, how does the collimated output change?

First open an OPD plot, and then click on the thickness of surface 3. The click on Tools -> Miscellaneous -> Slider, and set it up as follows:



You can enter start and stop values of the thickness of surface 3 (ZEMAX makes a reasonable guess as to what values you want) and then you can either use the slider to manually adjust the value within this range or press the Animate button to have ZEMAX loop through the values. The OPD plot will update automatically as the thickness of surface 3 changes. You can choose to update all open windows or just a nominated window as the parameter is varied.

The Slider is very useful for quick analysis of the sensitivity of a parameter to adjustment, or for a rough optimization by hand. Like the Quick Adjust tool, the Slider remains open while you adjust other data, open other windows etc, and you can have as many sliders open at one time as you wish.

Note that since the Slider and Quick Adjust tools are not Analysis windows, they are not saved when the file is saved.