The performance of optical systems with quasi-monochromatic partially coherent illumination.

The design and the prediction of the imagery of an optical system that is used with partially coherent illumination are complicated by the nonlinearities of this operation. The performance of the optical system is affected by both the nature of the illumination and the characteristics of the object, as well as by the aberrations of the system. A program for computing the energy distribution in the images of a class of standard objects as a function of the illumination and the pupil function of the optical system has been written. The theoretical approach is similar to that described by H. H. Hopkins in 1957.

The use of merit functions based on wavefront aberrations in automatic lens design.

Three types of merit functions were applied in automatic design of optical systems: mean square value of wave aberrations; variance of wavefront aberrations; and variance of an MTF based function suggested by H. H. Hopkins. They have proved to be very powerful in the final stages of optimization of well corrected systems and lend themselves readily to automatic control of minimization. The method of application and actual design examples are described.