Spherical aberration from trajectories in real and hard-edge solenoid fields

Abstract

For analytical, real and hard-edge solenoidal axial magnetic fields, the low-energy electron trajectories are obtained using the third-order paraxial ray equation. Using the particle trajectories, it is shown that the spherical aberration in the hard-edge model is high and it increases monotonously with hard edginess, although the focal length converges, in agreement with a recent field and spherical aberration model. The model paved the way for a hard-edge approximation that gives correct focal length and spherical aberration, which is verified here by the trajectory method. In essence, we show that exact hard-edge fields give infinite spherical aberrations.