Abstract

We examine the propagation of Gaussian beams through optical systems in situations of reduced symmetry. One such situation might be an optical system with rotated toroidal or cylindrical lenses so that there are no planes of symmetry. Another could be a Gaussian beam centered along a skew ray. Expressions for the associated spot size and wavefront curvature and resonant frequencies are derived as well as the orientation of the principal axes in an extension of the ABCD law. This is done for a general optical system described by a 4 x 4 ray matrix where all the matrix elements are assumed to be finite.

© 1991 Optical Society of America