First-order aberration of a misfocused self-imaging system

We analyze the characteristics of a self-imaging system that appear across a misfocused image plane. We approach this problem from the point of view of aberration theory. First, we derive the aberration functions (corresponding to several self-imaging rays of different orders) which are linear in a small shift of focus, and then we examine their roles in the amplitude spectra of misfocused self-images. We show that the aberration of the mth-order self-imaging ray is responsible for a lateral shift of the image amplitude component of frequency m/Mp, where M is the magnification of the system and p is the fundamental period of an object grating. We also analyze the role of wavefront aberrations in the image irradiance as an observable quantity. We then show that the theoretical estimation of irradiance of the aberrated image is in good agreement with the experiment and the focus-shift aberration can exert a severe effect on the irradiance spectrum of image in a complicated way.