General diffraction integral for converging freeform vectorial fields

Abstract

Herein it is presented a new vector diffraction integral capable to compute the diffraction patterns for aspheric and freeform wavefronts, with different pupil shapes, and different polarization states. The aforementioned vector diffraction integral is based on the energy conservation theorem, the far field approximation, and the angular spectrum representation of optical fields. The integral is validated through illustrative examples whose results are as expected and coincides with the related works.