Metalens enhanced ray optics: an end-to-end wave-ray co-optimization framework

Area of Science:

• Optical Engineering
• Computational Optics
• Nanophotonics

Background:

• Traditional optical systems often struggle with aberrations and performance limitations.
• Integrating diverse optical components like metalenses and geometrical lenses presents design challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a fully differentiable framework for seamless integration of wave and geometrical optical components.
• To enhance the performance of large-scale, end-to-end optical systems.

Main Methods:

• Utilized gradient-based optimization techniques.
• Focused on integrating metalenses, geometrical lenses, and image data.
• Developed a framework for designing nonparaxial imaging systems.

Main Results:

• Successfully demonstrated the design of nonparaxial imaging systems.
• Showcased the correction of aberrations inherent in geometrical optics.
• Achieved efficient and effective optimization of the entire optical system.

Conclusions:

• The proposed differentiable framework enables enhanced performance of integrated optical systems.
• This approach facilitates the correction of aberrations and design of complex optical systems.
• Offers a pathway for improved end-to-end optical system design and optimization.