Abstract
A material shift in optical components from glasses to polymers has been facing a peculiar problem of larger birefringence characteristic. Birefringence causes an inherent error in optical systems. Here, an optimization of various types of controllable factors based on the inverse analysis is proposed toward elimination of such birefringence distributions. As a single parameter for evaluating birefringence through the design, manufacturing and in-service processes, we adopted stresses which can be converted from the stress-optical law or the Wertheim law. After formularization of the proposed method, its applicability was examined through simple numerical simulations. It is shown that ill-posedness of the problem can be overcome by introducing the L-curve method although further improvement is still required.
