Primary aberrations theory in optical systems composed of Cartesian refracting surfaces

Abstract

Among the main defects present in optical systems are geometric aberrations, which are well characterized for spherical and aspherical surfaces. Special cases of aspherical surfaces are the Cartesian surfaces since they exhibit rigorous stigmatism and also, for a subfamily of these surfaces, aplanatism. However, for objects outside the stigmatic points, these surfaces also present geometric aberrations, so to evaluate their performance, it is necessary to characterize them. Therefore, in this work, the geometrical aberrations presented in Cartesian surfaces are studied, where the formulation of the coefficients for primary aberrations includes the corresponding expressions for the conic sections of revolution refractive surfaces as particular cases, and likewise the spherical refractive surface.