L. N. HAZRA^* and S. CHATTERJEE

Department of Applied Physics, University of Calcutta, 92 APC Road, Calcutta 700 009, India

(Received October 1, 2004; Accepted March 31, 2005)

Prefaced with a brief description of the state of the art in computer aided lens design optimization, this paper reports a prophylactic strategy to obtain global or quasiglobal optimum solutions for this nondeterministic polynomial (NP) time hard problem. For the synthesis of multicomponent lens systems, a top down approach is employed first to obtain paraxial and central aberration targets for the constituent thin components. Central aberrations of a component are the aberrations when stop is on the component. Suitable structural designs for the individual components are determined by evolutionary programming. Overall systems synthesized with these quasiglobally optimum components are reoptimized by local optimization algorithms. Illustrative numerical results on the second step of the design procedure are presented.

Key words: Optical design, lens design, global optimization, structural design, computer aided lens design, multicomponent lens systems synthesis and evolutionary programming

^*Corresponding author. E-mail address: lnhazra@sify.com