LAUSR

The differential equation that defines the Zernike system, originally proposed to classify wavefront aberrations of the wavefields in the disk of a circular pupil, had been shown to separate in three distinct coordinate systems obtained from polar coordinates on a half-sphere. Here we find and examine the separation in the generic elliptic coordinate system on the half-sphere and its projected disk, where the solutions, separated in Jacobi coordinates, contain Heun polynomials.The differential equation that defines the Zernike system, originally proposed to classify wavefront aberrations of the wavefields in the disk of a circular pupil, had been shown to separate in three distinct coordinate systems obtained from polar coordinates on a half-sphere. Here we find and examine the separation in the generic elliptic coordinate system on the half-sphere and its projected disk, where the solutions, separated in Jacobi coordinates, contain Heun polynomials.