title: Computer-guided alignment III: description of inter-element alignment effect in circular-pupil optical systems.
abstract: We present an analytic description of the inter-element alignment effect of misaligned optical systems with circular pupils. The description shows that decenter and tilt produce lateral displacement of the field and pupil coordinates, whilst a despace directly modifies the aberration coefficients by perturbing paraxial distances and scale factors of the two coordinates. This reveals that a misaligned surface not only changes its aberration characteristics, but also affects those of subsequent surfaces, which is the essence of the inter-element alignment effect. This description, combined with primary aberration theory, was applied to various misaligned systems to approximate their aberrations and alignment sensitivities given by ray-tracing. The results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of this approach. We also discuss the potential usefulness of the description in estimating the axial separations between surfaces.
authors.affiliation: 1Astrophysics sub-department, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. hlee@astro.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Hanshin
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Gavin B
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Dalton
authors.forename: Ian A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Tosh
authors.forename: Sug-Whan
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Kim
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016477:Artifacts; D003198:Computer Simulation; D017076:Computer-Aided Design; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D055095:Optics and Photonics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D011680:Pupil; D012542:Scattering, Radiation