Cylindrical diffractive lenses recorded on PVA/AA photopolymers

Abstract

Photopolymers are optical recording materials appealing for many different applications such as holography, data storage, interconnectors, solar concentrations, or wave-guides fabrication. Recently the capacity of photopolymers to record diffractive optical elements (DOE’s) has been investigated. Different authors have reported proposes to record DOE like fork gratings, photonics structures, lenses, sinusoidal, blazed or fork gratings. In these experiments there are different experimental set-ups and different photopolymers. In this work due to the improvement in the spatial light modulation technology together with the photopolymer science we propose a recording experimental system of DOE using a Liquid Cristal based on Silicon (LCoS) display as a master to store complex DOE like cylindrical lenses. This technology permits us an accurate control of the phase and the amplitude of the recording beam, with a very small pixel size. The main advantage of this display is that permit us to modify the DOE automatically, we use the software of the LCoS to send the voltage to each pixel In this work we use a photopolymer composed by acrylamide (AA) as polymerizable monomer and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). We use a coverplated and index matched photopolymer to avoid the influence of the thickness variation on the transmitted light. In order to reproduce the material behaviour during polymerization, we have designed our model to simulate cylindrical lenses and used Fresnel propagation to simulate the light propagation through the DOE and analyze the focal plane and the properties of the recorded lenses.