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.