Continuous surface-relief microoptical elements and their replication in polymer and other materials

摘要

This paper describes the enabling technologies developed at INO to generate continuous surface-relief profile diffractive and refractive optical elements in photoresist. Grey-scale mask photolithography based on high-energy beam sensitive glass and laser direct writing have been used to fabricate aspherical refractive and diffractive microlenses respectively, Properties of refractive microlenses are compared to those fabricated by the standard reflow technique. The replication of such elements by injection molding and UV-embossing in acrylic and custom hybrid sol-gel glasses respectively is described. Fidelity of replication in the various processing steps is given. Optical performance of aspherical microlenses with f-numbers between 0.69 and 7 as well as thermo-mechanical properties of organic/inorganic materials are given,