Two-mirror compact system for ideal concentration of diffuse light

Abstract

We introduce a simple, compact two-mirror system for diffuse light concentration. The design principle is based on local conservation of optical brightness. The system design is flexible, and we are able to compute mirror shapes given arbitrary incident beam direction and target cross-sectional shape. As illustration, we showcase our design for flat and cylindrical target geometries, and we also demonstrate that our system is able to concentrate efficiently along one or two dimensions. We perform numeric experiments that confirm our theoretical results and provide diffuse light concentration very close to the thermodynamic limit in all cases we considered.