The three-dimensional point spread function and statistical image surface of the image-intensifier electron-optical system

An improvement in the methods of numerical calculations of the field distribution and electron-optical ray tracing makes numerical evaluation of image-intensifier systems very practical for real devices. The essential means of assessing the system's properties are the classical two-dimensional point spread function (PSF) and the electron focal surface. However, the positions of separate image points depend on the initial photoelectron parameters, resulting in a statistical longitudinal spread of the image surface positions. This paper contains a three-dimensional PSF generalization based on a statistical-image-surface (SIS) concept, which is proposed for electron-optical systems. The aim of this work is to present a computer method for the numerical determination of the SIS concept and to show a sample application to the image-intensifier system with monochromatic illumination.