Robust optical design and closed-form tolerancing through autodiff-based Hessian spectral analysis
Robust optical design demands quantitative knowledge of how manufacturing and alignment tolerances degrade system performance. We show that analysing the perturbation eigenmodes of the Hessian matrix gives qualitative insight about the mechanisms of performance degradation (such as couplings) that is invisible to classical sensitivity-matrix analysis based on the Jacobian alone. Via the envelope theorem, we prove that the first-order sensitivity of the fully compensated system is identical to that of the uncompensated one; refocusing only acts at second order through the Schur complement of the Hessian. We propose the trace of the tolerance-scaled Hessian %,$\Tr(\mathbf{S}\mathbf{H}\mathbf{S})$, as a single scalar robustness metric. Demonstrated on an off-axis three-mirror anastigmat and scaled to a twenty-three-parameter surface-figure model, eigenmode decomposition reveals the dominant sensitivity directions and yields deterministic tolerance budgets that replace costly Monte Carlo sampling.