Hamiltonian orbit structure of the set of paraxial optical systems.

In the paraxial regime of three-dimensional optics, two evolution Hamiltonians are equivalent when one can be transformed to the other modulo scale by similarity through an optical system. To determine the equivalence sets of paraxial optical Hamiltonians one requires the orbit analysis of the algebra sp(4, R) of 4 x 4 real Hamiltonian matrices. Our strategy uses instead the isomorphic algebra so(3, 2) of 5 x 5 matrices with metric (+1, +1, +1, -1, -1) to find four orbit regions (strata), six isolated orbits at their boundaries, and six degenerate orbits at their common point. We thus resolve the degeneracies of the eigenvalue classification.