Complex diffractive optical elements stored in photopolymers

Abstract

Photopolymers have been used mainly for holographic recording applications. Nowadays, the improvements made in diffusion models, simulating phase image stored in these materials, enable a wide range of complex diffractive optical elements (DOEs) to be fabricated. Concurrently, the miniaturization of spatial light modulators makes it possible to generate both symmetric and non-symmetric DOEs. We show the procedure to record different complex diffractive elements, and we study the viability to fabricate them based on photopolymers. In particular we evaluate the recording of achromatic lenses, axicons and fork gratings interesting to obtain optical vortices. To achieve this goal, we use a three-dimensional diffusion model, previously experimentally validated with the recording of diffractive lenses.