Lens in a Voice Coil - A Compact Design Approach for Z-Scanners

摘要

State of the art laser-based refractive surgery instruments require precise optical beam steering and focusing capabilitiesto actively control an operational laser beam during eye surgery. As part of an industrial collaboration,Celera Motion and SwissOptic AG worked on a novel design approach to realize a compact, actively controlledlens moving mechanism for beam focusing. This system incorporates a closed loop voice coil driven air bearingthat integrates a focusing lens of 10mm in diameter in a low module footprint. The application driven designapproach, modularity, and scalability of the solution will be presented together with results of the practicalsystem evaluation. Thereby, the achieved optical alignment accuracy of the moving lens of only a few micronsalong a moving range of up to 80mm in combination with a lateral movement bandwidth up to 100 Hz indicatebest agreement with the design requirements for the driving unit. Since the developed driving mechanism o ershigh system performance for additional applications, the authors will give further application examples and showscalability approaches for various lens diameters and moving ranges for customized z-scan units in optical systems.As part of future developments, design modi cations for applications with higher bandwidth requirementsand reduced module footprint with lower weight will be discussed.