September 2019
Spotlight Summary by Bharathwaj Narasimhan
Expansive scope of aplanatic concentrators and collimators
Aplanatic systems are seen primarily as imaging optical systems which are free from spherical aberration and coma, and which can be viewed as an optical imaging component that pushes the imaging beyond a point source and towards an extended one. The basic conditions governing the design of such systems are 1) fulfillment of a constant path length for all rays emanating from the pupil and 2) the system should satisfy the Abbe sine condition. Thus, aplanatic systems have found significant use in concentration and illumination applications, which approach thermodynamic limits. The authors’ previous works have delved extensively into a new class of two-surface aplanatic systems that were not known before. In this paper, they specifically present results pertaining to hybrid and Fresnel aplanats, which are conceptualized as a combination of previously presented designs. This new hybrid class offers an extra degree of design freedom, thereby effectively contributing towards a more compact version of the optic. These designs, along with their mathematical background, are very significant for any optical designer keen on designing concentrator and illumination designs with practical fabrication constraints in mind.
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Article Information
Expansive scope of aplanatic concentrators and collimators
Heylal Mashaal, Daniel Feuermann, and Jeffrey M. Gordon
Appl. Opt. 58(22) F14-F20 (2019) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF