Finding order in the design landscape of simple optical systems

Contrary to the frequent tacit assumption that the local minima of a merit function are points scattered more or less randomly over the design landscape, we have found that, at least for simple imaging systems (doublets with three and triplets with five variables) all design shapes we have observed thus far form a strictly ordered set of points,...

Looking for order in the optical design landscape

In present-day optical system design, it is tacitly assumed that local minima are points in the merit function landscapewithout relationships between them. We will show however that there is a certain degree of order in the design landscapeand that this order is best observed when we change the dimensionality of the optimization problem and when...

Generating saddle points in the merit function landscape of optical systems

Finding multiple local minima in the merit function landscape of optical system optimization is a difficult task, especially for complex designs that have a large number of variables. We discuss here a method that enables a rapid generation of new local minima for optical systems of arbitrary complexity. We have recently shown that saddle points...