Design, fabrication, and evaluation of diffractive optical elements for generation of focused ring patterns

Focused ring patterns are used for many applications like corneal surgery, micro drilling, optical trapping, etc. The generation of focused ring patterns in the earlier reported cases employed many refractive optical components with different functions. As a result the optics configurations of the ring pattern generation systems are bulkier. In diffractive optics, it is possible to alter a function of an element and also integrate multiple functions in a single element. In this paper, we present the design, fabrication and evaluation of single and composite diffractive optical elements for the generation of focused ring patterns. A diffractive toric Fresnel zone lens was designed for parallel beam illumination. This element is compared with other composite diffractive elements capable of generating focused ring patterns. The toric Fresnel zone lens and composite elements were fabricated using electron beam direct writing. The fabricated elements were found to exhibit interesting properties, with the toric lens out-performing the other elements in several areas such as efficiency, focal depth, and ring thickness..