The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory lens design program, in which a lens moves steadily toward diffraction-limited performance, samples lens performance with bundles of precisely traced skew rays, analyzes performance by calculating the image-spot sizes and positions, and optimizes performance in a least squares system that drives the lateral ray deviations toward zero. Minimizing the rms image-spot size minimizes the rms optical path difference (OPD). Minimizing the rms OPD also optimizes the diffraction modulation transfer function (DMTF). Minimizing the image-spot size and position errors minimizes and balances all seven Seidel aberrations because all seven cause lateral deviations of the rays from their ideal image points.

Date Published: 13 November 1980
PDF: 3 pages
Proc. SPIE 0190, Los Alamos Conference on Optics 1979, (13 November 1980); doi: 10.1117/12.957713

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0190:
Los Alamos Conference on Optics 1979
Donald H. Liebenberg, Editor(s)