Diffractive phase elements for pattern formation: phase-encoding geometry considerations

摘要

Space-invariant, multilevel, diffractive phase elements are designed for large-scale pattern-formation tasks. The importance of the design algorithm and the phase-encoding geometry of the diffractive element is discussed with regard to the performance of both on-and off-axis reconstruction, notably for pixelated gratings. A new phase-encoding scheme is presented that results in an increase of the diffraction efficiency for the off-axis case. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.