Calculation of spot diagrams of different vector beams using geometrical ray tracing

Abstract

Spot diagrams are the intersection coordinate points in the image plane of the incoming rays from a point object. When the point object is imagined to be at infinity, the spot diagram can be considered as a representation of the point spread function (PSF) of the imaging lens. The performance of an imaging system for various applications can be analyzed with the help of the spot diagrams. In this paper, we will present our work using exact ray tracing that can be employed to compute the spot diagrams of both scalar and vector beams such as radially polarized beam, azimuthally polarized beam, etc.