Читать книгу Optical Engineering Science - Stephen Rolt - Страница 70

In the previous chapter, we developed a generalised description of third order aberration, introducing the five Gauss-Seidel aberrations. The motivation for this is to give the reader a fundamental understanding and a feel for the underlying principles. At the same time, it is fully appreciated that optical system design and detailed analysis of aberrations is underpinned by powerful optical software tools. Nevertheless, a grasp of the underlying principles, including an appreciation of the form of ray fans and optical path difference (OPD) fans, greatly facilitates the application of these sophisticated tools.

The treatment presented here is restricted to consideration of third order aberrations. Before the advent of powerful software analysis tools, the designer was compelled to resort to a much more elaborate and complex analysis, in particular introducing an analytical treatment of higher order aberrations. For all the labour that this would involve, the reader would gain little in terms of a useful understanding that could be applied to current design tools. As the third order aberrations are third order in transverse aberration and fourth order in OPD, so succeeding higher order aberrations are fifth, seventh etc. order in transverse aberration, but sixth, eighth order in OPD. That is to say, aberrations, whose order is expressed conventionally in terms of the transverse aberration, can only be odd. One can re-iterate the analysis of Section 3.4 to generate the form and number of terms involved in the higher order aberrations. This is left to the reader, but it is straightforward to derive the number of distinct terms N_n as a function of aberration order, n:

(4.1)

In concentrating on third order aberrations, we shall, in the remainder of this chapter, seek to determine the impact of refractive surfaces, mirrors, and lenses on all the Gauss-Seidel aberrations. This analysis will proceed, initially, on the assumption that the surface in question lies at the pupil position. Subsequently, the impact of changing the position of the stop will be analysed. Manipulation of the stop position is an important variable in the optimisation of an optical design. The concept of the aplanatic geometry will be introduced where specific, simple optical geometries may be devised that are wholly free from either spherical aberration (SA) or coma (CO). These aplanatic building blocks feature in many practical designs and are significant because, in many instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes, there is a tendency for spherical aberration and coma to dominate the other aberrations. The elimination of spherical aberration and coma is thus a priority. Furthermore, by the same token, astigmatism (AS) and field curvature (FC) are more difficult to control. In particular, the control of field curvature is fundamentally limited by Petzval curvature, as alluded to in the previous chapter.

Figure 4.1 Calculation of OPD for refractive surface.