A model for designing and analyzing complicated surface relief diffractive elements in the resonance domain is developed. It is based on subdividing the complicated diffractive element into many highly efficient local diffraction gratings whose surface relief modulations can be effectively characterized as slanted volume gratings for which closed form analytic solutions exist. The model is illu...

Nondiffracting beams are useful for alignment applications because the size of the beam does not change as the beam propagates. In this research we report a technique that allows for distance measurements with nondiffracting beams. With our approach a diffractive optical element is designed that generates two off-axis, tilted, nondiffracting Bessel function beams. These beams intersect at a des...

Distances to multiple targets are measured simultaneously using a single femtosecond pulse laser split through a diffractive optical element. Pulse arrival from each target is detected by means of balanced cross-correlation of second harmonics generated using a PPKTP crystal. Time-of-flight of each returning pulse is counted by dual-comb interferometry with 0.01 ps timing resolution at a 2 kHz ...

In this paper an optoelectronic system for fast grey-level image decomposition into binary slices is presented. To perform thresholding we take advantage of the differential nature of optical thyristors and compare the light level of the image pixels with that of a reference intensity. For the input a grey-level image was generated using a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) and, for t...

A novel method of rapid three-dimensional optical metrology that is based on triangulation of a configuration of color-coded light stripes is presented. The method exploits polychromatic illumination and a combined diffractive-refractive element, so the incident light is focused upon a stripe that is axially dispersed, greatly increasing the depth-measuring range without any decrease in the axi...

A beam shaping method is presented where a diffractive optical element (DOE) is designed by optimizing the complex mode coefficient weights of a set of Gaussian beam modes. This method is compared with the more standard unidirectional approach. Differential evolution is used for the optimization in both the unidirectional and Gaussian beam mode optimization methods. For the particular transform...

We demonstrate, for what is believed to be the first time, the design of diamondlike photonic crystals made by holographic lithography based on five-beam interference. All five beams are launched from the same half-space, and the exposure can easily be realized by a single diffractive optical element. The photonic structure can be constructed through the translation of the interference pattern ...

Differential interference contrast is a potentially powerful technique for contrast enhancement in soft X-ray microscopy. We describe the design and fabrication of single-element diffractive optical elements suitable as objectives for high-resolution differential interference contrast microscopy in the water-window spectral range. A one-dimensional pattern calculation followed by an extension t...

We previously reported several static three-dimensional (3-D) display implementations of the partial pixel architecture [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 12, 73 (1995)]. We report herein our f irst real-time 3-D display based on this architecture. The display is functionally equivalent to a real-time holographic stereogram. It is autostereoscopic and provides horizontal motion parallax. The display device is...