There are a growing number of articles in the Freeform optics literature that optimize based upon third order aberrations. This is a classical approach, but not (?) supported by a Merit Function wizard in Zemax OpticStudio. I am wondering if there is a specific reason.
For example, Ken Moore impressed upon people that optimizing for the spot width in X and spot width in Y was much more computationally efficient that the radial spot size. This was a great observation and one that required some thought and experiment to discover. This is incorporated into the wizard for spot size optimization.
A wizard to sum up the third order aberration contribution from each surface would be trivial to create (ZOS-API or otherwise). It would seem to be computationally efficient and a good starting point for optimizing many designs especially given it is the textbook approach to explaining why aberration theory is useful. Yet it is conspicously absent from OpticStudio.
Is there a compelling technical / performance reason why this is absent from examples, the merit function wizard, and the documentation for Zemax OpticStudio?
-B
