Ray-tracing simulation method using piecewise quadratic interpolant for aspheric optical systems

Abstract

We present a new method for precise ray-tracing simulation considering form errors in the fabrication process of aspheric lenses. The Nagata patch, a quadratic interpolant for surface meshes using normal vectors, is adopted for representing the lens geometry with mid-spectral frequencies of surface profile errors. Several improvements in the ray-patch intersection calculation and its acceleration technique are also proposed. The developed algorithm is applied to ray-tracing simulation of optical disk pick-up aspheric objectives, and this technique requires 10(5) to 10(9) times fewer patches than a polygonal approximation. The simulation takes only several seconds on a standard PC.