Hello and welcome to this first course on Optical System Design. My name is Robert McLeod. I'm a Professor of Optics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Together with my colleague, Dr. Amy Sullivan, we will be teaching you how to design systems like you see here. This is what Galileo would use today if he was studying the sky. The point is systems like this are ubiquitous, optical telescopes, microscopes, medical sensors, the LIDAR, and your self-driving car. Optical systems are everywhere around you, and they can seem a bit doubting. It turns out the fundamental principles about how you would design a system like this are actually relatively simple, and the goal of course is to teach you those design principles. We'll start by taking you into the laboratory with us and showing you can understand light as bundles of rays like we show here. Those rays might reflect off of the back of this prism, or they might refract through a block of glass. If you curve that block of glass, you might focus the rays, and you've just made yourself the simplest possible lens. We'll use diagrams like this based on very simple trigonometry to derive the properties of lenses and optical systems made of lenses. So that we can take systems of lenses, we can reduce them to simple straight lines, because in this course, everything is going to be straight lines, and analyze their properties and design them to do something we want, to magnify to image, something like that. Once we have those, what we'll call first-order perfect designs, we want to know how they might perform with real glass and in real operating conditions. So we'll design real glass, and we'll put those designs into Zemax OpticStudio. This code will be available to you, and it allows you to then, using the same basic techniques of shooting rays through a system, understand this zoom lens, where there's a couple elements here that open and close to change its properties. We'll look at now the spots that form over here perhaps on a camera plane. When do that, we'll find there's a function of those three spots that you saw and maybe as a function of the three configurations spacing between the lenses, that in some configurations, the lens is working very, very well, and in other configurations, the spot has gotten a bit large. That may be good enough or maybe not for your application. If it's not good enough, we'll learn how to optimize with that code, put in new glass, change in bend, and reshape things to make it work better. That is fundamentally the process of optical design. We start with first-order principles, we lay out with ruler and simple calculations the functions we want, we derive what lenses would do that, we turn them into real glass, we put them up in a code like OpticStudio, and we optimize the performance. If you do that, you may end up like me being able to spend your day in a cool laser lab. Things like the beam splitters and the lenses here will be something you understand very well. This is a lot of fun, and I hope you will enjoy coming along with us on this journey and learning how to design such systems.
