Design of high-performance optical systems

This course may also be counted toward ECEA 5602 toward CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyeglasses to medical endoscopes, cell phone cameras, and orbital telescopes. This course expands on what you’ve learned about designing first-order paraxial systems and optical resolution and efficiency by introducing you to real-world lenses and their imperfections. We’ll begin by describing how different wavelengths propagate through systems, then move on to the aberrations that occur in high-angle nonparaxial systems and how to correct for these problems. The course concludes with a discussion of optical components beyond lenses and an excellent example of a high-performance optical system: the human eye. The mathematical tools needed to analyze high-performance systems are complex, so in this course we’ll rely more heavily on Zemax’s OpticStudio. This will allow students to analyze systems that are too complex for the simple analysis presented so far in this course set.