High tolerance to off-axis aberrations with a birefringent lens

We report a systematic investigation on the imaging behavior of an optical system consisting of a lens made of a uniaxial birefringent crystal sandwiched between two linear polarizers with the introduction of prespecified off-axis aberrations such as astigmatism and coma. The intensity point spread function is used as the image assessment parameter. It has been shown that for a point object, the proposed system has higher tolerance to the presence of off-axis aberrations than an imaging system formed by an ordinary glass lens. Some specific cases are computed and illustrated graphically.