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Resonance domain surface relief diffractive lens for the visible spectral region
1Department of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. omribarlev@gmail.com
Applied Optics
|March 6, 2013
Summary
Researchers developed new diffractive lenses by incorporating volume hologram properties. These advanced diffractive lenses overcome previous limitations, achieving high diffraction efficiency for micro-optics applications.
Area of Science:
- Optics and Photonics
- Materials Science
Background:
- Diffractive lenses faced limitations like overlapping foci and low optical power.
- Advances in refractive micro-optics presented competition.
- Volume holograms offer Bragg properties that can be applied to diffractive lenses.
Purpose of the Study:
- To overcome limitations of traditional diffractive lenses.
- To improve diffraction efficiency and eliminate ghost orders.
- To design and fabricate a high numerical aperture binary off-axis resonance domain diffractive lens.
Main Methods:
- Incorporated Bragg properties of volume holograms into diffractive lens design.
- Utilized analytical effective grating theory for design.
- Fabricated the lens using direct e-beam writing.
- Etched the lens in fused silica.
- Experimentally investigated the fabricated lens.
Main Results:
- Eliminated ghost diffractive orders.
- Overcame the trade-off between diffraction efficiency, phase levels, and feature size.
- Designed a binary off-axis resonance domain diffractive lens with a numerical aperture of 0.16.
- Achieved a measured diffraction efficiency exceeding 81%.
Conclusions:
- The new diffractive lens design significantly surpasses the performance of thin binary optics.
- This approach offers a promising path for advanced micro-optics with high efficiency.
- The developed diffractive lenses are suitable for applications requiring high numerical apertures and efficiency.
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