Moldless Printing of Silicone Lenses With Embedded Nanostructured Optical Filters

Optical lenses are among the oldest technological innovations (3000 years ago) and they have enabled a multitude of applications in healthcare and in our daily lives. The primary function of optical lenses has changed little over time; they serve mainly as a light-collection (e.g. reflected, transmitted, diffracted) element, and the wavelength and/or intensity of the collected light is usually manipulated by coupling with various external optical filter elements or coatings. This generally results in losses associated with multiple interfacial reflections, and increases the complexity of design and construction. In this work we introduce a change in this paradigm, by integrating both light-shaping and image magnification into a single lens element using a moldless procedure that takes advantage of the physical and optical properties of mesoporous silicon (PSi) photonic crystal nanostructures. Casting of a liquid poly(dimethyl) siloxane (PDMS) pre-polymer solution onto a PSi film generates a droplet with contact angle that is readily controlled by the silicon nanostructure, and adhesion of the cured polymer to the PSi photonic crystal allows preparation of lightweight (10 mg) freestanding lenses (4.7 mm focal length) with an embedded optical component (e.g. optical rugate filter, resonant cavity, distributed Bragg reflector). Our fabrication process shows excellent reliability (yield 95%) and low cost and we expect our lens to have implications in a wide range of applications. As a proof-of-concept, using a single monolithic lens/filter element we demonstrate: fluorescence imaging of isolated human cancer cells with rejection of the blue excitation light, through a lens that is self-adhered to a commercial smartphone; shaping the emission spectrum of a white light emitting diode (LED) to tune the color from red through blue; and selection of a narrow wavelength band (bandwidth 5 nm) from a fluorescent molecular probe.