A Wigner-based ray-tracing method for imaging simulations

A Wigner-based ray-tracing method for imaging simulations

Mout, B.M.
Wick, M.
Bociort, F.
Urbach, H.P.

Applied Sciences

ImPhys/Imaging Physics

2015-12-31

The Wigner Distribution Function (WDF) forms an alternative representation of the optical field. It can be a valuable tool for understanding and classifying optical systems. Furthermore, it possesses properties that make it suitable for optical simulations: both the intensity and the angular spectrum can be easily obtained from the WDF and the WDF remains constant along the paths of paraxial geometrical rays. In this study we use these properties by implementing a numerical Wigner-Based Ray-Tracing method (WBRT) to simulate diffraction effects at apertures in free-space and in imaging systems. Both paraxial and non-paraxial systems are considered and the results are compared with numerical implementations of the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld and Fresnel diffraction integrals to investigate the limits of the applicability of this approach. The results of the different methods are in good agreement when simulating free-space diffraction or calculating point spread functions (PSFs) for aberration-free imaging systems, even at numerical apertures exceeding the paraxial regime. For imaging systems with aberrations, the PSFs of WBRT diverge from the results using diffraction integrals. For larger aberrations WBRT predicts negative intensities, suggesting that this model is unable to deal with aberrations.

Wigner Distribution Function
ray-tracing
diffraction
optical simulation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5a65108b-f870-4985-95c4-e002fbba55ce

SPIE

978-1-62841-819-4

Proceedings of SPIE: International Society for Optical Engineering, Vol. 9630. Optical Systems Design 2015: Computational Optics. Edited by Daniel G. Smith, Frank Wyrowski, Andreas Erdmann. Jena, Germany, 7-9 September, 2015

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2015 SPIE