Jiang Miao, Guo Yubing, Yu Hao, Zhou Ziyuan, Turiv Taras, Lavrentovich Oleg D, Wei Qi-Huo
Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, OH, 44242, USA.
Department of Physics, Kent State University, Kent, OH, 44242, USA.
Adv Mater. 2019 May;31(18):e1808028. doi: 10.1002/adma.201808028. Epub 2019 Mar 25.
Microlenses are desired by a wide range of industrial applications while it is always challenging to make them with diffraction-limited quality. Here, it is shown that high-quality microlenses based on Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phases can be made with liquid crystal polymers by using a plasmonic photopatterning technique. Based on the generalized Snell's law for the PB phases, PB microlenses with a range of focal lengths and f-numbers are designed and fabricated and their point-spread functions and ability to image micrometer-sized particles are carefully characterized. The results show that these PB microlenses with f-number down to 2 are all diffraction-limited. The capability of arraying these PB microlenses with 100% filling factor with a step-and-flash approach is further demonstrated.
微透镜在广泛的工业应用中具有需求，然而制造出具有衍射极限质量的微透镜一直具有挑战性。在此，研究表明通过使用等离子体光图案化技术，可以利用液晶聚合物制造出基于潘查拉特纳姆 - 贝里（PB）相位的高质量微透镜。基于PB相位的广义斯涅尔定律，设计并制造了一系列具有不同焦距和f数的PB微透镜，并对其点扩散函数以及对微米级颗粒成像的能力进行了仔细表征。结果表明，这些f数低至2的PB微透镜均具有衍射极限。进一步证明了采用步进闪光方法将这些PB微透镜以100%填充因子排列的能力。
