Computer-guided alignment I : Phase and amplitude modulation of alignment-influenced optical wavefront.

As the first part of a development programme on computer-guided alignment (CGA), we model the alignment influence on the optical wavefront in terms of the phase and amplitude modulation. This modulation is derived from the interaction between alignment parameters and influence functions, both expressed in complex form. The alignment influence model is used to approximate the ray-traced target wavefront of a randomly mis-aligned multi-element system. The approximated wavefront shows a factor of ~ 100 improvement in predicting the target, when coupled non-linear influences among elements are included. This demonstrates the significance of the inter-element effect. We discuss the possibility of adopting the model for rectifying mis-alignment of multi-element systems.