• Current Optics and Photonics
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.44-50
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• 2022

An off-axis zone plate is able to focus on a single order while neglecting the zeroth order in a visible imaging system. This allows one to enhance the contrast quality in diffractive images, which is the major advantage of this type of zone plate. However, most previous reflection zone plates are used in focusing X-rays with a small grazing incident angle and are intricately designed with the use of a local grating period. In this study, we suggest the design of an off-axis elliptical zone plate (EZP) that is used to focus a monochromatic light beam with separation between the first and unfocused orders under a large grazing incident angle of 45°. An assumption using the total grating period, which depends on the average and constant grating period, is proposed to calculate the desired distance between the first and zeroth order and to simplify the construction of a novel model off-center EZP. Four diffractive optical elements (DOEs) with different parameters were subsequently fabricated by direct laser lithography and then verified using a performance evaluation system to compare the results from the assumption with the experimental results.

• Current Optics and Photonics
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• 제5권1호
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• pp.8-15
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• 2021

An elliptical zone plate (EZP) array is important in off-axis optical systems because it provides two advantages. First, the residual beam and the main source are not focused in the same direction and second, the light from the observation plane is not reflected back towards the beam source. However, the fill factor of the previous EZP array was about 76% which was a little low. Hence, this EZP array could not collect the maximum amount of illumination light, which affected the overall optical performance of the lens array. In this study, we propose a new EZP array design with a 97.5% fill factor used in off-axis imaging system for enhancement of brightness and contrast. Then, direct laser lithography was used to fabricate the high fill factor EZP array by moving the XY linear stage of the system in a zigzag motion. The imaging properties of the proposed EZP array were experimentally verified at the focal plane and compared with the previous model.