Aberrations of purely wave nature

摘要

In the paraxial theory of image formation in Gaussian optical systems, both geometric optics and wave optics descriptions of light propagation ideally predict stigmatic (sharp) images in conjugate planes, the occurrence of aberrations being due to non-paraxial effects. In this work it is shown by a direct example of ray and wave propagation in a non-Gaussian lensguide that wave aberrations in image formation can occur within the paraxial approximation which do not correspond to ray aberrations. Such aberrations are a signature of the wave nature of light and demonstrate that paraxial ray and wave descriptions of light aberrations are in general not equivalent. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. [References: 13]