Flight School

Seven lessons from first taxi to confident aerobatics. Each one is self-contained, copy-paste runnable, states what you should expect to see, and ends with the habits that separate good pilots from lucky ones. Prerequisite: the Quick Start.

• Lesson 1 · Spectra 101

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  Sweep wavelength, read totals vs. the specular order, and meet absorption — the honest reason R+T < 1.

  Start

• Lesson 2 · Splitting Light

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  1-D gratings: diffraction orders as exit lanes, exit angles checked against the grating equation.

  Start

• Lesson 3 · Sculpting Wavefronts

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  Metasurfaces: build meta-atoms from shapes, harvest 2π of phase, peek at the near field.

  Start

• Lesson 4 · Sweeping Gracefully

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  Efficient parameter sweeps, the convergence ritual, and 2-D design maps.

  Start

• Lesson 5 · Twisting Light

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  Linear angles, circular co/cross decomposition, and measuring chirality.

  Start

• Lesson 6 · Coming in at an Angle

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  Oblique incidence, dispersion maps, and spotting Rayleigh–Wood anomalies in the wild.

  Start

• Lesson 7 · Designing the Shape Itself

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  Inverse design: state a goal and evolve a meta-atom's own shape parameters — arm lengths, rotation, height — with a genetic algorithm.

  Start

After graduation: Aerobatics (batch runs, ML pipelines, custom everything), The Hangar (complete worked examples) and Need for Speed (making it all fast).

Shipped demo scripts

The package carries runnable examples too — try python -m ikarus.examples.feature_tour for the full guided airshow.