Abstract

A caustic merit function, which measures the spread of the caustic surfaces from an ideal image point, has been defined for use in minimizing all orders of the monochromatic aberrations of an optical system. Evaluation of this function requires a few rays to be traced through the optical system. For a triplet lens the caustic merit function, which is subject to the constraint that the total power of the lens remain constant, has been used to optimize several lenses. The rms blur circle radius for the optimized systems has been evaluated and compared with that of the original systems. Since the caustic merit function describes all order of image aberrations, the present results suggest that the caustic merit function could be used in designing arbitrary optical systems and could have wide use in the area of computer automated optical design.

© 1987 Optical Society of America