Handbook of Optical Systems, Physical Image Formation (Volume 2)

Herbert Gross, born in 1955, joined Carl Zeiss in 1982 after finishing his physics degree as specialist for optical design. Since 1995 he has been working as head of the department of optical design, while also teaching as a lecturer in Aalen and Lausanne. The new handbook is an intuitive, didactically elegant approach to the subject of optical systems and is not competed by any other work on the market. The selected board of authors, all reputed industrial experts, guarantee the timeliness of the well coordinated, coherent chapters. The second volume presents a more rigorous physical description of the image formation in optical systems on the basis of first principles. Starting with wave equation and the theory of diffraction, readers are introduced in detail to the Fourier theory of optics, since this is a necessary assumption for an understanding of the finite resolution of optical systems, the basic optical quality criteria, the imaging in three dimensions, the influence of the illumination and the coherence and polarization properties of the light source. In particular, the connection between the geometrical and the wave optical models are explained and readers are able to understand the well-known simulation algorithms used in the calculation of the exact properties of modern optical systems.