Design of cascaded diffractive optical elements generating different intensity distributions at several operating wavelengths

TL;DR

This paper presents a gradient-based method for designing cascaded diffractive optical elements that generate specific intensity patterns at multiple wavelengths, demonstrated through complex color image simulations.

Contribution

A novel gradient optimization approach for designing cascaded DOEs that produce different intensity distributions at multiple wavelengths.

Findings

Effective generation of complex color images using cascaded DOEs

High accuracy in matching specified intensity distributions

Successful application to three-wavelength radiation focusing

Abstract

We consider the design of cascaded diffractive optical elements (DOEs) for generating specified intensity distributions for several incident beams with different wavelengths. For each incident beam with a given wavelength, the cascaded DOE forms a different specified intensity distribution. The problem of DOE design is formulated as the problem of minimizing a functional that depends on the functions of diffractive microrelief height of the cascaded DOE and represents the deviations of the intensity distributions generated at the operating wavelengths from the specified ones. Explicit expressions are obtained for the derivatives of the functional, and on this basis, a gradient method for calculating a cascaded DOE is formulated. The proposed gradient method is used for the calculation of cascaded DOEs focusing radiation of three different wavelengths into different areas. In particular, the calculation of a cascaded DOE generating a complex color image of parrots is considered. The presented numerical simulation results demonstrate high performance of the proposed method.