Tunable liquid-filled lens integrated with aspherical surface for spherical aberration compensation

Abstract

A novel liquid-filled lens design is presented. During fabrication, high precision single point diamond turning (SPDT) is introduced into standard soft lithography process to fabricate an aspherical surface constituting one end of lens. This enables the spherical aberration associated with the operation of the conventional liquid-filled lenses to be compensated for. Through flexibly optimizing this surface contour, it can be designed to work within particular working regions with improved optical quality. At the same time, the deformable elastic membrane is still adopted at the other end of the lens, thus preserving the high focal length tunability. This proof of concept and the performance of the proposed lens have been demonstrated using the lateral shearing interferometry experiment. © 2010 Optical Society of America.