Improved first Rayleigh-Sommerfeld method applied to metallic cylindrical focusing micro mirrors

An improved first Rayleigh-Sommerfeld method (IRSM1) is intensively applied to analyzing the focal properties of metallic cylindrical focusing micro mirrors. A variety of metallic cylindrical focusing mirrors with different f-numbers, different polarization of incidence, or different types of profiles are investigated. The focal properties include the focal spot size, the diffraction efficiency, the real focal length, the total reflected power, and the normalized sidelobe power. Numerical results calculated by the IRSM1, the original first Rayleigh-Sommerfeld method (ORSM1), and the rigorous boundary element method (BEM) are presented for quantitative comparison. It is found that the IRSM1 is much more accurate than the ORSM1 in performance analysis of metallic cylindrical focusing mirrors, especially for cylindrical refractive focusing mirrors with small f-numbers. Moreover, the IRSM1 saves great amounts of computational time and computer memory in calculations, in comparison with the vectorial BEM.