The 2010 IODC lens design problem: the green lens

Abstract

The lens design problem for the 2010 IODC is to design a 100 mm focal length lens in which every optical surface has the same radius of curvature, positive or negative, or is plano. The lens is used monochromatically at 532 nm and is made of only Schott N-BK7 glass. The goal of the problem is to maximize the product of the semi-field of view and the entrance pupil diameter while holding the distortion to within ±5% and the RMS wavefront error to ≤ 0.07 wave within the field of view. There were 37 entries from eight different countries. Four different commercial lens design programs were used, along with two custom, in-house programs. The number of lens elements in the entries ranged from 3 to 64. The overall length of the lenses varied from 105 mm to 3.6 km. The winning entry had an entrance pupil diameter of 81.3 mm and a semi-field of view of 43.5° for a merit function product of 3537.