Design of High-Performance Optical Systems

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5602, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. This course extends what you have learned about first-order, paraxial system design and optical resolution and efficiency with the introduction to real lenses and their imperfections. We begin with a description of how different wavelengths propagate through systems, then move on to aberrations that appear with high angle, non-paraxial systems and how to correct for those problems. The course wraps up with a discussion of optical components beyond lenses and an excellent example of a high-performance optical system – the human eye. The mathematical tools required for analysis of high-performance systems are complicated enough that this course will rely more heavily on OpticStudio by Zemax. This will allow students to analyze systems that are too complicated for the simple analysis thus far introduced in this set of courses.