Differential Ray Tracing Formulae; Applications Especially To Aspheric Optical Systems

Abstract

Applications of differential ray tracing are shown. Special attention is focussed on aspheric surfaces. Differential ray tracing formulae are an efficient tool to calculate the changes of imaging errors in an easy, fast, and accurate way. These changes are caused by the following parameters: - initial ray data variation in the object space - design data variation of the optical system. By varying the initial ray data in the object space additional information about the in-fluence of aperture and field angle is given. Aberrations of higher order which must be taken into account in aspheric systems can be seen as well. Speed and accuracy of differential ray tracing prefer this method to calculate the solu-tion matrix which is needed for optimation. Here the system data of the optical system are varied. Actually finite differences are still used nowadays. By variations of the design data information is obtained about the tolerance sensitivity of the system. Special atten-tion is directed to the aspheric coefficients. Here especially spherical surfaces are considered, too, because they may become aspheric by manufacturing errors.