Anidolic, or nonimaging, optics is the branch of optics concerned with the optimal transfer of light radiation between a source and a target. An example of such problem is the design of a reflector knowing the light intensities of the source and the target and their respective geometries. An application could be the design of street lamps: optimizing the light distribution would decrease the energy consumption. We can show that this problem is equivalent to solving the so-called Monge-Ampère equation, which is highly non-linear and thus is very difficult to solve numerically.
During this PhD, we would like to improve and develop tools based on geometric methods and optimal transport to solve these equations with a high resolution.