Generalized ray tracing, caustic surfaces, generalized bending, and the construction of a novel merit function for optical design

Abstract

Generalized ray tracing is an algorithm for calculating the geometrical parameters of a wave front in the neighborhood of a traced ray. These calculations are applied, surface by surface, for each traced ray, to an optical system being designed. These calculations determine the two points of contact of each traced ray with the two sheets of a caustic surface. The caustic surfaces are, in fact, aberrated three-dimensional images of object points and therefore contain all information on the geometrical aberrations of the subject lens. Generalized bending is a procedure in which the curvature of a pair of adjacent spherical refracting surfaces, their separation, and the distance to the next succeeding or next preceding surface may be changed so that any paraxial ray is left invariant except at the two affected surfaces. In this study we show that the displacement of a caustic point caused by a generalized bending is in essentially a straight line, that the direction of the displacement is determined by which refracting surfaces are selected, and that the magnitude of the displacement is proportional to the logarithm of the bending parameter. This suggests that caustic surfaces can be used as a merit function in the optical design process, that the merit functions can be calculated by means of generalized ray tracing, and that generalized bending provides an effective means of optimizing the design when included in a feedback loop.