High-Efficiency Multilevel Phase Lenses with Nanostructures on Polyimide Membranes

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel nanofabrication method for creating high-efficiency, multilevel phase Fresnel zone plates on flexible polyimide membranes, significantly improving focusing efficiency and reducing diffraction artifacts for advanced optical applications.

Contribution

It introduces a direct nanofabrication technique for membrane-based multilevel phase lenses with high efficiency, surpassing traditional amplitude-type FZPs in performance.

Findings

16-level phase lenses achieve over 91.6% focusing efficiency

Lenses produce diffraction-limited focus with weak side-lobes

Significant reduction in unwanted diffraction orders

Abstract

The emergence of planar meta-lenses on flexible materials has profoundly impacted the long-standing perception of diffractive optics. Despite their advantages, these lenses still face challenges in design and fabrication to obtain high focusing efficiency and resolving power. A nanofabrication technique is demonstrated based on photolithography and polyimide casting for realizing membrane-based multilevel phase-type Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) with high focusing efficiency. By employing advantageous techniques, these lenses with nanostructures are directly patterned into thin polyimide membranes. The computational and experimental results have indicated that the focusing efficiency of these nanostructures at the primary focus increases significantly with increasing the number of phase levels. Specifically, 16-level phase lenses on a polyimide membrane can achieve a focusing efficiency of more than 91.6% of the input signal (9.5 times better than that of a conventional amplitude-type FZP) and focus light into a diffraction-limited spot together with very weak side-lobes. Furthermore, these lenses exhibit considerably reduced unwanted diffraction orders and produce extremely low background signals. The potential impact of these lenses extends across various applications and techniques including microscopy, imaging, micro-diffraction, remote sensing, and space flight instruments which require lightweight and flexible configurations.