The quadratic phase factor of tightly focused wavefronts

The phase structure is investigated at the focal plane of an aplanatic, high numerical aperture focusing optical system. The tightly focused field is numerically evaluated using combination of the Richards-Wolf approach and the Stratton-Chu diffraction integral. An investigation is performed for both 2D and 3D geometries for a number of different illumination structures, having piecewise quasi-constant phase at the entrance pupil and different polarization states. For the investigated illumination structures, the quadratic phase term of the focused field was found to depend on the structure of the incident illumination contrary to the paraxial case where it depends solely on the optical system parameters. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.