Achieving Tolerances in an Intolerant World: Telephoto Contact Lenses and Other Unconventional Imaging Systems

摘要

Optical system design is always constrained by achievable fabrication tolerances, and there is a constant balance between design performance and the cost or yield of the fabrication process. However, many of the best designs are achieved by starting from the manufacturing platform, and modifying the basic structure of the system to take maximum advantage of symmetries in the system. We will describe several optical systems whose symmetries have allowed us to bypass some of the more problematic tolerances. The first is a multi-reflection imaging system using concentric aspheric mirrors, diamond turned into a a single optical element, which allowed us to create a 3x magnification Galilean telescope just 1 mm thick, designed to be incorporated into a contact lens as a vision aid. The second system is a multi-scale lens design which explores a different type of symmetry: a bilateral monocentric primary lens, followed by over 200 identical secondary optics, which together form an aggregate 2500 megapixel imager. And the third system is a non-imaging solar concentrator using micro-optic lenslets and micro-reflectors which couple incident sunlight into a slab waveguide, where the problem of aligning the lenslets to the micro-reflectors has been bypassed by using the focal spot from each lenslet to form it's corresponding injection feature.