Diffractive optical elements offer the optical system designer powerful and often unique functionality in a compact package. For example, diffraction gratings can produce a large angular spread between closely spaced wavelengths, making them useful as dispersive elements in spectrometers and in wavelength division multiplexers (WDM). The performance characteristics of holographic optical elements, kinoforms and binary diffractives can be highly customized, permitting their use in applications ranging from correcting color aberration to beam shaping.
Performing optical design with diffractive optical elements has been challenging because it is difficult to precisely model certain aspects of their behavior. In particular, the amount of light that the component directs into each diffracted order — i.e., the scalar diffraction efficiency — typically must be computed separately and applied to the analysis results from commercial optical design software. Characterizing the scalar diffraction efficiency is important because stray light from unused orders can reduce contrast and modulation transfer function, and create ghost images...

Start a discussion on this article or any photonics topic in the Photonics.com Community Forum