OPEN SOURCE · MIT / AGPL RUNS ENTIRELY IN YOUR BROWSER

Design laser beamlines — with honest physics.

ModeForge propagates real laser beams — Gaussian, elliptical/astigmatic or measured M² beams — through lenses, windows and apertures. Plus pulse fluence, field-mode diffraction, camera beam-profile analysis and warnings that never sugar-coat. Free, open source, nothing to install.

Launch Workbench How it computes

No sign-up · no server compute · projects are plain JSON files

TWO-LENS TELESCOPE · LIVE

λ 1.064 µm · M² 1.0

TOOLKIT

FAST MODE

Paraxial ABCD propagation

Envelope plot along z with waists, Rayleigh ranges and divergence — for Gaussian, elliptical and moment-based beams.

PULSE

Pulse & fluence calculator

Pulse energy, peak power, fluence and intensity at any plane — Gaussian, sech² or rectangular shapes.

OPTIMIZER

Two-lens optimizer

Grid search over lens pairs with aperture, separation and fluence constraints, plus sensitivity analysis.

IMPORT

ZMX & AGF import

Read Zemax sequential files and glass catalogs; unknown glasses block honestly instead of guessing silently.

FIT

Measured-beam fit

Paste caustic scans, recover M² and waist by least squares, and adopt the fit as your beam source.

CAUSTIC

Caustic campaigns

Evaluate image stacks along z: second moments per plane, waist and M² with uncertainty bands, honest plane gates, and back-calculation of the source through a measurement train.

IMAGE

Beam-profile analysis

Analyze camera frames (TIFF/PNG/PGM): background correction, D4σ second moments, Gaussian & super-Gaussian fits, residual map — release gates honestly withhold uncertain numbers.

FIELD

Scalar field propagation

Fresnel and angular-spectrum methods reveal diffraction at hard apertures — cross-checked against the paraxial envelope.

PHYSICS PRINCIPLES

01 Warnings first Every result carries machine-readable warnings — aperture margins, sampling limits, validity ranges. Nothing fails silently.

02 Validated against references Every formula is tested against textbook and reference cases; the validation suite ships with the repo.

03 Headless core UI and physics are strictly separated: the same core runs in the browser, the CLI and CI — identical numbers everywhere.

04 Open project files Projects are versioned JSON documents — diffable, scriptable, archivable. No lock-in.

ModeForge

Open-source laser beamline designer

Rho-Labs · Patrick Feix

modeforge.rholabs.de

Toolkit

FAST · paraxial ABCD envelope

OPT · two-lens optimizer

IMP · ZMX/AGF import

FIT · measured-beam fit (M²)

IMG · beam-profile analysis

FLD · scalar field propagation

Resources

GitHub Guide Docs Validation Open Workbench Support ☕

Status

v 2.2 · October 2026

MIT · AGPL-3.0 (analyzer, caustic)

◇ Paraxial approximation — not a substitute for full wave optics or a safety assessment.

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