Electromagnetic diffraction in optical systems - I. An integral representation of the image field

Abstract An integral representation is obtained for the electromagnetic field in the image space of an optical system . This representation, which is not restricted to systems of low angular aperture, is in the form of an angular spectrum of plane waves, and is closely related to that introduced by Luneberg (1944) as a vector generalization of well-known formulae of Debye (1909) and Picht (1925). It is shown that the representation has a simple physical interpretation in terms of a modified Huygens—Fresnel principle which operates with secondary plane waves rather than with secondary spherical waves.