Diffractive Optical Element Fabrication based on 3D Printing

Introduction

Diffractive Optical Elements (DOEs) are used to shape the wavefront of incident light in complex patterns and are ubiquitous across optical applications, ranging from laser processing through lithography to communication and imaging. Despite their popularity, fabricating DOEs is non-trivial, mostly due to their nanoscale-precision requirements, necessitating highly precise, expensive, and cumbersome fabrication methods (typically using photolithography), which are also limited in the design flexibility they allow.

Development of a New Method

During the PI’s ERC-StG, we developed a method to enable simple, fast, and high-quality fabrication of DOEs by combining 3D printing with near-index matching by liquid immersion. This results in DOEs comparable in performance to the state-of-the-art, yet manufactured at a fraction of the cost and time.

Current Limitations

Still, at this point, these DOEs need to be immersed in a small liquid-containing chamber to operate, which prevents mass adoption of the technique by the market.

Goals of the Project

Hence, the main goals of this PoC are:

1. Adapt our 3D-printing based near-index matching technique to yield fully solid DOEs.
2. Fabricate and demonstrate several proof-of-concept industry-relevant elements.
3. Explore various strategies to bring our technique to the market.

Potential Impact

Our technology has the potential to transform the world of DOE fabrication by drastically simplifying the fabrication process, shifting the relevant scales from weeks to hours, from thousands of dollars to a few dollars per element, and finally – alleviating the need for a cleanroom environment. This will significantly democratize the process of DOE fabrication, making it available in low-resource settings.