Wavefronts and Spherical Aberration

摘要

Matrices are traditionally used to study optical systems under Gaussian approximation. The fact that a ray of light that enters an optical system along the optic axis exits unaffected is made use of in devising a matrix method to calculate the aberration coefficients up to any desired order. In this paper we show how this technique could be applied to study not only the aberration of a single refracting surface but also to calculate the wavefront shapes. As an example we also provide the analysis of Indiana reduced eye model.