Wavefront aberrations induced by coatings in high-precision imaging systems

Multilayer coatings are widely applied to high-precision imaging optics to improve throughput. In short-wavelength systems, however, coatings not only alter transmittance/reflectance but also introduce pronounced phase effects and coating-induced lateral shifts, which collectively manifest as additional wavefront aberrations at the system level. This work systematically investigates coating-induced full-field degradation in short-wavelength imaging systems operated at small angles of incidence. A multilayer-coating break-point ray-tracing algorithm is used to incorporate coating-induced phase and lateral-shift effects into the geometrical ray-tracing workflow, enabling a comparative evaluation of coating-induced wavefront aberrations in the visible, infrared, and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) bands. A six-mirror EUV projection system (NA = 0.25) is then analyzed to quantify the wavefront changes introduced by a uniform 40-bilayer Mo/Si multilayer coating. Furthermore, a full-field wavefront analysis method based on Gram–Schmidt orthogonalization (GSO) is developed to characterize the field dependence of Fringe-Zernike aberration coefficients over a curved image field. The results indicate that coating-induced wavefront aberrations are negligible for long-wavelength systems but become significant in the short-wavelength regime. In the EUV example, the coating introduces strong tilt and defocus, increasing the RMS wavefront error from 0.016λ to 0.842λ. Full-field analysis shows a 0.727λ field-dependent tilt component and a 0.034λ field-independent defocus component; the tilt terms primarily correspond to image translation, magnification variation, and low-order distortion. These results demonstrate that multilayer coatings can induce severe image-plane deformation in EUV systems and therefore must be accounted for during the optical design stage.