Optical system design based on lower aberration compensation method

Abstract

Nonlinear refractions cause inevitable aberrations in practical optical systems, thereby degrading the imaging quality. We propose a novel method for optical system design based on lower aberration compensation and Seidel aberration theory to reduce the sensitivity of each optical component and the complexity in assembling and aligning the components in a system. A mathematical model for lower aberration compensation method is established to derive the expressions for wave aberrations. Furthermore, an optimization program based on Zemax programming language (ZPL) macro is used to reduce the aberrations of each surface by controlling the merit function, and the optimization parameters for the system are obtained. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated by comparing the optimization results before and after the implementation of the lower aberration compensation method, which reveal that the sensitivity of each component is significantly reduced and the stability of the overall optical system is effectively improved.