Wavefront diagnosis of a Fourier light-field microscope using aberrations in Zemax

Abstract

Fourier light-field microscopy (FLFM) enables single-shot 3D imaging by placing a microlens array at the Fourier plane conjugate to the objective's aperture stop, yielding a spatially invariant 3D point-spread function and artifact-free reconstruction. This performance depends critically on a near-diffraction-limited wavefront reaching the pupil. We present a full digital replication and diagnostic study of a high-NA (1.1, water-immersion) FLFM setup in Zemax OpticStudio, built to reproduce our physical laboratory system from the laser source through the illumination relay onto the objective back focal plane. As the manufacturer discloses no model of the commercial objective, we designed an equivalent 1.1-NA water-immersion objective from scratch, matching its key specifications, to serve as a controlled reference. The system still failed to collimate, proving the four-lens illumination relay — not the objective — as the source of degradation. Because the commercial tube lens is provided only as a black-box element, standard Seidel analysis is inapplicable; we therefore extracted Zernike Standard Coefficients to quantify the higher-order phase errors across the pupil. This work establishes a hardware-level verification workflow for FLFM and provides the corrected wavefront baseline required for subsequent Fourier-plane microlens-array design.