Propagation of aberrated wavefronts using a ray transfer matrix.

A ray transfer matrix is used to calculate the propagation of aberrated wavefronts across a homogeneous refractive index. The wavefront is represented by local surface normals, i.e., by a ray bundle, and the propagation is accomplished by transferring those rays across the space. Wavefront shape is generated from the slopes and positions of the collection of rays. Calculation methods are developed for the paraxial case, for higher-order expansions, and for the exact tangent case. A numerical example is used to compare results between an analytical method and the methods developed here.