Wavefront spacing and Gouy phase in presence of primary spherical aberration

We study the Gouy phase of a scalar wavefield that is focused by a lens suffering from primary spherical aberration. It is found that the Gouy phase has different behaviors at the two sides of the intensity maximum. This results in a systematic increase of the successive wavefront spacings around the diffraction focus. Since all lenses have some amount of spherical aberration, this observation has implications for optical calibration and metrology. © 2013 Optical Society of America