Abstract

Component alignment and testing are critical to the final performance of any optical system. Methods of computer aided alignment to improve optical system performance have been gaining increasing attention from investigators.^1,2,3By using wavefront aberration measurements in several fields and applying the method of reverse optimization⁴, perturbing a computer model of the ideal optical system to match the imperfect real system, it is possible to not only calculate the misalignments of the system components but to also measure errors in the surface figures. This makes it possible to perform surface figure tests on components that may be too expensive or difficult to test interferometrically by themselves, and allows computer-aided alignment to be performed on systems for which the exact surface figure of the components may be unknown, making modelling difficult.

© 1990 Optical Society of America