Aplanatic waxicons
Abstract
Waxicon mirror components offer many advantages in designing optical systems for transporting high power laser beams. The widespread use of waxicons has been limited because of their high sensitivity to tilt errors. This paper gives the equations of the surfaces of a waxicon that is rigorously corrected for both spherical aberration and coma. Computer ray tracing has confirmed its low sensitivity to tilt errors: if the aplanatic waxicon as a whole is tilted by a small angle delta, the RMS wavefront error in the output beam will be proportional to sq delta.
- Publication:
-
Los Alamos Conference on Optics
- Pub Date:
- January 1979
- Bibcode:
- 1979SPIE..190...10M
- Keywords:
-
- High Power Lasers;
- Mirrors;
- Optical Correction Procedure;
- Optical Reflection;
- Ray Tracing;
- Wave Front Deformation;
- Aberration;
- Computer Graphics;
- Magnification;
- Root-Mean-Square Errors;
- Surface Geometry;
- Optics