Diffractive Lenses for Medical Applications

Hybrid lenses combine the advantages of classic refractive components and diffractive structures, and hence have become a promising approach in different optical applications, such as intraocular lens implants for treatment of cataracts. In particular, the opposite signs of the dispersion for refractive and diffractive surfaces enable the correction of chromatic aberrations.

In order to model and design such a hybrid element accurately, the in-depth analysis of diffraction effects through the system is a necessity. This includes the evaluation of diffraction efficiencies of real structures in combination with the fast and accurate calculation of the point-spread function (PSF). VirtualLab Fusion’s highly flexible approach of interoperable modeling techniques on a single platform is key to enable the precise and quick modeling of classic lenses and calculation of the diffraction efficiencies of the different orders of a diffractive lens.

To illustrate the capabilities of the software in this regard, the near and far field view of a designed hybrid lens are analyzed in the example. Moreover, the effect of varying the height of the designed binary element on the diffraction efficiencies is investigated to further optimize the optical function. In order to evaluate the resulting PSFs similar to the perception of a human eye, photometric quantities, such as illuminance and luminous flux, are used, which can easily be determined with the help of VirtualLab’s flexible detector concept.