Investigation of light propagation methods used to calculate wave-optical PSF

In this study, we investigated the suitability of various light propagation methods and their usefulness in terms of calculating the wave-optical point spread function (PSF) of an optical imaging system. To analyze an aberration in an optical imaging system in order to obtain its PSF, light propagation methods are widely used to obtain the light intensity distribution on the observation plane. Both the Fresnel-Kirchhoff and Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction formulae are commonly used in light propagation simulations. Recently, there have been many reports concerning light propagation methods in the field of digital holography. These methods are based on the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction formula and use discrete Fourier transformation. These methods are referred to as the angular spectrum and Fresnel diffraction methods. In this study, these propagation methods are evaluated in terms of the degree of accuracy offered and their associated calculation costs. In order to demonstrate and investigate the features of these propagation methods, we employed a Tessar lens system, which is composed of four lenses. The wavefront aberration of the lens system is obtained by a ray tracing simulation and is used to generate the generalized pupil function. Next, the Rayleigh- Sommerfeld diffraction formula and the light propagation method based on this formula are used to calculate the waveoptical PSF using the pupil function. We applied these simulation methods to various recently proposed propagation methods and discussed the suitability of the various light propagation methods under consideration for calculating the wave-optical PSF.