Efficient assessment of polarization aberrations in optical systems: method development and comparison with existing approaches

Abstract In the fields of high-resolution imaging and high detection accuracy, polarization aberrations in optical systems become critical error sources. Polarization aberrations are determined by both structural parameters and thin‑film parameters of optical systems, making their calculation complex and time‑consuming. Thanks to the characteristic that polarization aberrations can be decomposed into a superposition of different components, the Orientation Zernike Polynomial (OZP) decomposition is employed. Based on this decomposition, a simplified method for obtaining polarization aberrations is proposed in this paper. Only 36 sampled rays are required, and the number of rays can be flexibly adjusted according to the retained OZP modes that represent the constituent components of polarization aberrations. The numerical accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated by comparison with high-density reference results from dense polarization ray tracing for various optical systems. For a typical system, the maximum diattenuation and retardance errors are only 1.111×10-4 and 1.153×10-4 rad, respectively. Meanwhile, the calculation time for this method is only 2.15 seconds, in contrast to 383.55 seconds required for dense sampling. In addition, the proposed method is compared with two other simplified methods. The comparison results indicate that, for the reflective, refractive, and catadioptric systems examined in this study, the proposed method provides good accuracy, whereas the other simplified methods tend to perform well only for some specific system types. These findings provide references for selecting appropriate simplified methods in practical applications.