Optical Design for the Optimum Solid Immersion Lens with High Numerical Aperture and Large Tolerance

Super hemispherical solid immersion lens system becomes a matter of interest due to its high numerical aperture (NA) gain. However, because of the instability of the aplanatic condition, even small amount of alignment error can easily lower the optical performance. To overcome the instability while maintaining high NA gain, we suggest an optimum solid immersion lens (opti-SIL) system which combines the advantages of both super hemispherical SIL (hyper-SIL) and hemispherical SIL (hemi-SIL). Exemplary designs and simulation results of the tolerance analysis show that opti-SIL system has much higher tolerances to various performance-lowering factors than hyper-SIL, even with relatively small NA resignation. [DOI: 10.1143/JJAP.46.3724]