Practical automated glass selection and the design of apochromats with large field of view

This paper presents an automated approach to the selection of optical glasses for the design of an apochromatic lens with large field of view, based on a design originally provided by Yang et al. Appl. Opt.55, 5977 (2016)APOPAI0003-693510.1364/AO.55.005977. Following from this reference's preliminary optimized structure, it is shown that the effort of glass selection is significantly reduced by using the global optimization feature in the Zemax optical design program. The glass selection process is very fast, complete within minutes, and the key lies in automating the substitution of glasses found from the global search without the need to simultaneously optimize any other lens parameter during the glass search. The result is an alternate optimized version of the lens from the above reference possessing zero axial secondary color within the visible spectrum and a large field of view. Supplementary material is provided in the form of Zemax and text files, before and after final optimization.