After more than 13 years of work and 25 releases we are proud to announce version 1.0 of the interferometer simulation tool Finesse!
http://www.gwoptics.org/finesse
Finesse is a fast and relatively easy to use software to simulate laser interferometers. It can be used for detector commissioning, interferometer design, or simply for learning more about laser optics. It is freely available for many platforms and fully open source. We also provide simple examples and an extensive manual.
Of course, we will continue to extend and improve Finesse. This version 1.0 completes the open source release of Finesse after a period of extensive testing and optimising the modeling of higher-order modes for beam shape changes and mirror surface distortions. The future of Finesse lies in the implementation of radiation pressure effects and quantum noise calculations; in fact, we have already started work on this.
As always we want Finesse to be useful to the whole community, therefore we need your feedback and suggestions for features that you would find useful or you feel are missing. And if you apply Finesse to an interesting problem we would like to hear about it!
Thank you,
Daniel Brown, Charlotte Bond and Andreas Freise