ON-AXIS IRRADIANCE FOR SPHERICALLY ABERRATED OPTICAL-SYSTEMS WITH OBSCURED RECTANGULAR APERTURES - A STUDY USING THE WIGNER DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION

The assessment of optical focusing systems with obscured rectangular p upil masks suffering from spherical aberration is performed by use of a novel technique for the computation of the irradiance distribution a long the optical axis. It is shown that ail the values of this functio n for a variable spherical aberration can be obtained from a single bi dimensional phase-space representation: a Wigner distribution function associated with the pupil function of the system. Several numerical e xamples illustrating the behaviour of such aberrated systems are prese nted and some interesting features of the results are discussed.