A Simple Way to Fabricate Close-Packed High Numerical Aperture Microlens Arrays

Author

Xiangwei Meng ; Feng Chen ; Qing Yang ; Hao Bian ; Hewei Liu ; Pubo Qu ; Yang Hu ; Jinhai Si ; Xun Hou

Author_Institution

State Key Lab. for Manuf. Syst. Eng., Xi´an Jiaotong Univ., Xi´an, China

Volume

25

Issue

14

fYear

2013

fDate

15-Jul-13

Firstpage

1336

Lastpage

1339

Abstract

We present a developed femtosecond laser enhanced wet chemical etching method to fabricate close-packed and high numerical aperture (NA) microlens arrays (MLAs). Its ability to fabricate 100% fill factor MLAs with controllable NA is demonstrated and the maximum NA value of the lenses reaches to 0.47. This letter provides a simple and efficient way to achieve controllable and low cost optical elements. The close-packed and high-NA properties lead to excellent optical performance of the MLAs, which are highly required in high-resolution and high-signal-to-noise-ratio detections in micro-optical and integrated optical applications.

Keywords

high-speed optical techniques; laser beam etching; microlenses; optical arrays; optical fabrication; NA MLA; close-packed high numerical aperture microlens arrays; controllable optical element; femtosecond laser enhanced wet chemical etching; fill factor; high-resolution detection; high-signal-to-noise-ratio detection; integrated optical application; low cost optical element; microoptical application; optical performance; Femtosecond laser; high numerical aperture; microlens array; silica glass;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1041-1135

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LPT.2013.2264801

Filename

6519262