A page from "the drawer": how Roland Shack opened the door to the aberration theory of freeform optics

Kevin P. Thompson; Jannick P. Rolland

doi:10.1117/12.2064656

5 September 2014 A page from "the drawer": how Roland Shack opened the door to the aberration theory of freeform optics

Kevin P. Thompson, Jannick P. Rolland

Proceedings Volume 9186, Fifty Years of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona; 91860A (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2064656
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Roland Shack is credited with a number of what appear to be spontaneous inventions in the 1970s, including the Shack- Hartmann wavefront sensor, the Shack Cube interferometer, and the subject of this talk, an entirely new and revealing approach to the aberration fields of imaging optical systems that has come to be called Nodal Aberration Theory and recently emerged as the aberration of rotationally nonsymmetric imaging optical systems with freeform surfaces. Prof. Shack’s original impetus for considering a new approach to aberration theory was a puzzling through-focus star field photograph brought to him by astronomers in 1976 taken with the first large telescope made at the Optical Sciences Center, the 90” Bok Telescope. By 1977, he had developed the key mathematical moves needed to send aberration theory into an entirely new direction. He transferred this insight on one piece of engineering pad paper and moved on to other projects.

Citation Download Citation

Kevin P. Thompson and Jannick P. Rolland "A page from "the drawer": how Roland Shack opened the door to the aberration theory of freeform optics", Proc. SPIE 9186, Fifty Years of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona, 91860A (5 September 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2064656

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