Research on reflective zoom system with 3 mirrors

This paper uses the third-order aberration theory to design a reflective zoom optical system. The advantage of this method is that, by solving a set of Seidel aberration coefficient functions, it allows the designer to achieve the initial construction parameters of the optical system, i.e., radii of curvature and separations between mirrors, etc. In order to verify the accuracy of this method, a prototype of a coaxial zoom optical system with three mirrors is designed. This paper introduces the manufacturing process of the prototype in detail, describes the procedures of aligning and experimenting, and analyzes the experiment results in the end. In this way, the feasibility of this method is confirmed.