Roadmap for the unobscured three-mirror freeform design space

In rotationally symmetric lens design, there are rule-of-thumb boundaries on field-of-view and aperture for well-known design forms that provide valuable information to the designer prior to starting a design. In the design space of unobscured three-mirror imagers, freeform optics have been shown to provide a significant benefit over conventional surface shapes, but the degree to which they improve the performance for any given combination of field-of-view, entrance pupil diameter, and F-number remains unknown. Thus, designers of these systems are not afforded any pre-design information to inform their specification decisions. Here, we designed over 200 systems to establish a first-of-its-kind roadmap of specification ranges over which an unobscured three-mirror imager using freeform surfaces can achieve diffraction-limited performance in the visible spectrum. The scalability of the findings to the infrared regions of the spectrum is also addressed. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement