Fast method for designing broadband achromatic diffractive optical elements.

Abstract

Diffractive optical elements play a crucial role in the miniaturization of the optical systems, especially in correcting achromatic aberration. Considering the rapidity and validity of the design method, we propose a fast method for designing broadband achromatic diffractive optical elements. Based on the direct binary search algorithm, some improvements have been made including the selection of the initial height map to mitigate the uncertainty, the reduction of the variations to accelerate the optimization and the increase of sampling rate to deal with the large operation bandwidth. The initial height map is calculated instead of random initial value. Due to different regions of the height map contributing to point spread functions differently, the variations are reduced to speed up the optimization. The large operation bandwidth is solved by increasing the sampling rate at unfitted wavelengths instead of setting weighting coefficients. We demonstrate via simulations that our method is effective through several examples. The design of broadband achromatic diffractive optical elements can be quickly achieved by our method.