Analysis of polarization characteristics of freeform surface optical system

Abstract

Freeform surfaces are widely used in off-axis optical systems with large aperture, large field of view, and long focal length. The polarization effect caused by the non-rotationally symmetrical shape has an impact on the system’s polarization imaging quality and measurement accuracy. Based on Jones’ notation, this paper proposes a polarization aberration analysis method for fringed Zernike polynomial freeform optical systems and constructs a full-field polarisation aberration analysis model of non-rotationally symmetric freeform reflective optical systems. The light propagation vector k is added on the basis of the two-dimensional ray tracing algorithm. By tracing the full-field polarized light of the off-axis optical system in the field of view, the Jones pupil diagram is obtained. The phase aberration, diattenuation and retardance are separated by Pauli decomposition and SVD decomposition. The off-axis freeform surface optical system is designed. The analysis results show that the phase aberration of the off-axis freeform surface optical system is directly related to the surface shape of the freeform surface. The changes of the freeform surface to the diattenuation and retardance are both 56% of the diattenuation and retardance of the sistem. For deep-space telescopes and lithography systems, it is of great significance for improving system accuracy to master this change.

Keywords

• polarization aberration
• jones matrix
• freeform surface
• polarization ray tracing