Ray aberration for a biaxial holographic imaging system

Abstract

In revolution-symmetrical optical systems design, it is usual to extract information of aberrations from ray tracing of selected rays. In this work, we generalise the relationship between ray aberration and wave aberration for a biaxial imaging system that includes holographic optical elements (HOEs); both for conjugate planes perpendicular to optical axis or parallel to lens plane. We study the pattern of the light distribution at image plane produced by each aberration term, showing similarities and differences with those of revolution-symmetrical systems. We describe a practical procedure to complete characterisation of the imaging performance of biaxial optical systems including HOEs, by tracing only six rays. The principal advantage of this procedure is that we can obtain experimentally the aberration coefficients at the output of any imaging system including biaxial holographic elements. We show that aberration coefficients obtained from ray tracing have a good coincidence with those predicted by third-order approximation. We apply our procedure to pupil position optimisation in a holographic lens.