Poke (pronounced /poʊˈkeɪ/ or po-kay) uses commercial ray tracing APIs and open-source physical optics engines to simultaneously model scalar wavefront error, diffraction, and polarization to bridge the gap between ray trace models and diffraction models. It operates by storing ray data from a commercial ray tracing engine into a Python object, from which physical optics calculations can be made. Poke provides two propagation physics modules, Gaussian Beamlet Decomposition and Polarization Ray Tracing, that add to the utility of existing scalar diffraction models. Gaussian Beamlet Decomposition is a ray-based approach to diffraction modeling that integrates physical optics models with ray trace models to directly capture the influence of ray aberrations in diffraction simulations. Polarization Ray Tracing is a ray-based method of vector field propagation that can diagnose the polarization aberrations in optical systems.

POPPY (Physical Optics Propagation in PYthon) simulates physical optical propagation including diffraction. It implements a flexible framework for modeling Fraunhofer and Fresnel diffraction and point spread function formation, particularly in the context of astronomical telescopes. POPPY provides the optical modeling framework for WebbPSF (ascl:1504.007) and was developed as part of a simulation package for JWST, but is available separately and is broadly applicable to many kinds of imaging simulations.