Simulation of lateral color for a hybrid refractive-diffractive eyepiece by field tracing methods

Abstract

The simulation of optical systems with both, refractive and diffractive components is very challenging and can neither be solved by a classical ray tracing approach nor by a general rigorous Maxwell solver. That is why the concept of field tracing has been introduced which is a generalization of ray tracing: harmonic fields are traced through the optical system instead of ray bundles. This allows the smooth combination of different modeling techniques in different subdomains of the system called unified optical modeling. The techniques can be adapted locally to minimize the numerical effort whereas the accuracy is as high as needed. In this paper we apply field tracing techniques for the simulation of an eyepiece containing a diffractive lens for minimizing the lateral color. The results presented include higher diffraction orders appearing due to the grating-like structure of the diffractive lens.