PERFORMANCE OF OPTICAL SYSTEMS WITH QUASI-MONOCHROMATIC PARTIALLY COHERENT ILLUMINATION

The design and the prediction of the imagery of an optical system that is used with partially coherent illumination are complicated by the nonlinearities of this operation. The performance of the optical system is affected by both the nature of the illumination and the characteristics of the object, as well as by the aberrations of the system. A program for computing the energy distribution in the images of a class of standard objects as a function of the illumination and the pupil function of the optical system has been written. The theoretical approach is similar to that described by H. H. Hopkins in 1957. © 1969 Optical Society of America.