Inverse design and demonstration of high-performance wide-angle diffractive optical elements.

Diffractive optical elements are ultra-thin optical components required for constructing very compact optical 3D sensors. However, the required wide-angle diffractive 2D fan-out gratings have been elusive due to design challenges. Here, we introduce a new strategy for optimizing such high-performance and wide-angle diffractive optical elements, offering unprecedented control over the power distribution among the desired diffraction orders with only low requirements with respect to computational power.

Controlling ghost traps in holographic optical tweezers.

Computer-generated holograms displayed by phase-modulating spatial light modulators have become a well-established tool for beam shaping purposes in holographic optical tweezers. Still, the generation of light intensity patterns with high spatial symmetry and simultaneously without interfering ghost traps is a challenge. We have implemented an iterative Fourier transform algorithm that is capable of controlling these ghost traps and demonstrate the benefit of this approach in the experiment.

Binary diffractive beam splitters with arbitrary diffraction angles.

Diffractive optical beam splitters designed with iterative Fourier transform type algorithms can produce only certain diffraction angles given by the spatial frequencies used for the computations, which are multiples of a certain base spatial frequency. We have developed a design algorithm that overcomes this limitation and can be used to compute binary diffractive elements with arbitrary diffraction angles. The simulated and experimentally measured properties of optical elements producing beam arrays in circular arrangements are presented and discussed.