Achromatic fourier transforming properties of a separated diffractive lens doublet: theory and experiment

The strong chromatic distortion associated with diffractive optical elements is fully exploited to achieve an achromatic optical Fourier transformation under broadband point-source illumination by means of an air-spaced diffractive lens doublet. An analysis of the system is carried out by use of the Fresnel diffraction theory, and the residual secondary spectrum (both axial and transversal) is evaluated. We recognize that the proposed optical architecture allows us to tune the scale factor of the achromatic Fraunhofer diffraction pattern of the input by simply moving the diffracting screen along the optical axis of the system. The performance of our proposed optical setup is verified by several laboratory results.