Image field distribution model of wavefront aberration and models of distortion and field curvature

The distribution model of wavefront aberrations, which takes on a significant role in the designs and alignments of imaging optical systems without vignetting, is newly presented. This model decomposes the complicated distributions into the characteristic components, which clarifies the alignment criteria. For the actual alignments, only small displacements (decentering, tilt, and surface distance) of rotationally symmetric surfaces in the system are assumed. Then, the model, which regards the aberration distributions of the system as the sum of the contributions of each surface, is extended for the system with surface displacements. As a result of the derivation, it is concluded that the aberration distributions in the rotationally nonsymmetric systems can be expressed as the sum of several folds of rotationally symmetric components. In addition, it is presented that, based on this model, suitable distribution models, even of the arbitrary higher order, can be constructed for any aberration coefficients in various optical systems.