Diffractive lenses in biocompatible photopolymers using LCoS

Abstract

The improving of the technology related to the Spatial Light Modulators (SLM), which can be used to modulate the wavefront of a light beam in many different applications in Optics and Photonics, has widespread their use in many new ways. In particular, the continue miniaturization of the pixel size let them be used as a master for Diffractive Optical Elements(DOE) recording applications. One of these displays isthe parallel-addressed liquid crystal on silicon (PA-LCoS) microdisplay, which offers easily the possibility of phase-only modulation without coupled amplitude modulation, but can be use also as an amplitude master just rotating the angles of two polarizers. Together with the DOEs, the optic recording material is also one of the crucial componentsin the system. Photoresist has been used classically for this purpose. Recently some works provide results of the incorporation of photopolymers, initially used for holographic recording, to fabricate DOEs. Among photopolymers, polyvinil alcohol/acrylamide (PVA/AA) materials have been studied firstly due to the accurate control of their optical properties and the ease of fabrication. Nevertheless, this kind of photopolymer presents a high level of toxicity due mainly to the monomer, acrylamide. In this sense, we made efforts to search alternative “green” photopolymers, one of these is called “Biophotopol”. This material presents good optical properties; although, it has two principal drawbacks: its refractive index modulation is lower than the PVA/AA one and the dye used presents very low absorption at 532 nm. In order to solve these problems for recording spherical diffractive lenses, in the present work we have explored different possibilities. On the first place, we have modified the fabrication technique of the solid layer to achieve thicker samples, on the second place, we have introduced a biocompatible crosslinker monomer. These two actions provide us a higher value of the phase modulation capability. On the third place, we have modified the dye to record DOE’s with the wavelength of 532 nm and obtain a direct comparison with the results obtained with PVA/AA materials.