Impact of beam aberration on continuous phase plates performance

Ray trace and filtered random phase can be used as initial phase to design continuous phase plates (CPPs).The performance of the CPPs designed with the two ways was studied. The results show that the CPP with filtered random phase as initial phase has better defocusing and amplitude aberration tolerance compared with that with ray trace as initial phase. What’s more, wavefront aberration is the primary factor affecting the CPP’s performance and the tolerance to it is related with focal spot size. Thus relative phase aberration factor was introduced to quantify wavefront aberration and focal spot size and with the defined CPP performance standard the tolerance was 0.5 aberration factor.