Ray aberration for a biaxial holographic imaging system

In revolution-symmetrical optical systems design, it is usual to extract in formation of aberrations from ray tracing of selected rays. In this work, w e generalise the relationship between ray aberration and wave aberration fo r a biaxial imaging system that includes holographic optical elements (HOEs ); both for conjugate planes perpendicular to optical axis or parallel to l ens plane. We study the pattern of the light distribution at image plane pr oduced by each aberration term, showing similarities and differences with t hose of revolution-symmetrical systems. We describe a practical procedure t o complete characterisation of the imaging performance of biaxial optical s ystems including HOEs, by tracing only six rays. The principal advantage of this procedure is that we can obtain experimentally the aberration coeffic ients at the output of any imaging system including biaxial holographic ele ments. We show that aberration coefficients obtained from ray tracing have a good coincidence with those predicted by third-order approximation. We ap ply our procedure to pupil position optimisation in a holographic lens. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.