Resonance domain surface relief diffractive lens for the visible spectral region.

Early expectations for a role of diffractive lenses were dramatically lessened by their high order overlapping foci, low optical powers, and competing advances in refractive micro-optics. By bringing the Bragg properties of volume holograms to diffractive lenses we got rid of ghost diffractive orders and the critical trade-off between diffraction efficiency, number of phase levels, and spatial feature-size. Binary off-axis resonance domain diffractive lens with high numerical aperture of 0.16 was designed with analytical effective grating theory, fabricated by direct e-beam writing, etched in fused silica and experimentally investigated. More than 81% measured diffraction efficiency exceeds twice the limits of thin binary optics.