Resolving capacity of the circular Zernike polynomials

Circular Zernike polynomials are often used for approximation and analysis of optical surfaces. In this paper, we analyse their lateral resolving capacity, illustrating the effects of a lack of approximation by a finite set of polynomials and answering the following questions: What is the minimum number of polynomials that is necessary to describe a local deformation of a certain size? What is the relationship between the number of approximating polynomials and the spatial spectrum of the approximation? What is the connection between the mean-square error of approximation and the number of polynomials? The main results of this work are the formulas for calculating the error of fitting the relief and the connection between the width of the spatial spectrum and the order of approximation. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America