Fabrication and chacacterization of spherical aberration-free tunable aspherical lenses
At a Glance
Section titled āAt a Glanceā| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2016-01-01 |
| Authors | Pengpeng Zhao, ĆāŖaÄlar Ataman, Hans Zappe |
| Institutions | University of Freiburg |
| Citations | 3 |
Abstract
Section titled āAbstractāWe discuss the concept, fabrication and characterization of a novel liquid-tunable aspherical lens, designed and optimized via a generalized iterative design method involving analytical, FEA and ray-tracing analysis. This method allows the precision design of flexible meniscus that can deform into arbitrary radially symmetric optical surfaces under uniform pressure load. The lens has an aperture size of 3 mm, with 7.6 mm nominal focal length. The meniscus is fabricated by injection molding, using a mold formed by diamond turning. Theoretically, using 80 % of the clear aperture, the focal length of the lens can be tuned by 10% without any compromise in optical quality (e.g. diffraction limit), and by 80% with a drastic improvement in aberrations compared to conventional tunable-lenses. We experimentally demonstrate that at the optimized focal length of 7.6 mm, the optical performance approaches the diffraction-limit, and document the performance improvement over conventional lenses over the focal length range from 6 mm to 12 mm, through MTF comparisons and basic imaging tests.