Aberration-compensated supercritical lens for sub-diffractive focusing within 20° field of view.

The supercritical lens has shown a remarkable capability of achieving far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing through elaborating a modulated interference effect. Benefiting from the relative high energy utilization efficiency and weak sidelobe properties, the supercritical lens holds significant advantage in a series of application scenarios. However, all of the demonstrated supercritical lenses mainly work in the on-axis illumination condition, so the off-axis aberration effect will severely deteriorate its sub-diffraction limit focusing capability for the illuminating beam with an oblique angle. In this work, an aberration-compensated supercritical lens with single-layer configuration is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Such a single-layer supercritical lens consists of multilevel phase configurations patterned with the two-photon polymerization lithography technique. The simulation and experimental recorded results show that the aberration-compensated supercritical lens with a numerical aperture value of 0.63 could achieve a far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing property within 20° field of view at a wavelength of λ = 633 nm. This monochromatic aberration-compensated supercritical lens with single-layer configuration indicates excellent potential in the development of laser scanning ultrahigh optical storage and label free super-resolution imaging.

Environmentally robust immersion supercritical lens with an invariable sub-diffraction-limited focal spot.

Planar metalenses provide an effective way to break the diffraction barrier in the far field. Their physical mechanism and applications have been intensively studied in the past decade. These investigations on sub-diffraction-limited light modulations have only been applied to specified single immersion environments; however, changing immersion environments can severely degrade their focusing performance, limiting their application potential. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an environmentally robust immersion supercritical lens (SCL) that can work in various immersion environments. The design of such a lens is based on the vectorial Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction theory combined with a multi-objective optimization algorithm. The sub-diffraction-limited focusing effect has been experimentally demonstrated in commonly used media, including air, water, and oil, with refractive indices of 1.0, 1.33, and 1.51, respectively. Moreover, such a lens can maintain its effective numerical aperture at a fixed value, bringing a unique advantage in that the lateral size of the focal spots exhibits a similar value of ${{317}}\;{{\pm}}\;{{7}}\;{\rm{nm}}$ in all three media. Our demonstration provides the feasibility of SCLs in various application scenarios with multi-immersion environments, such as bioimaging, light trapping, and optical storage.

Supercritical lens array in a centimeter scale patterned with maskless UV lithography.

Microlens arrays (MLAs) are widely used in optical imaging, dense wavelength division multiplexing, optical switching, and microstructure patterning, etc. However, the light modulation capability for both the conventional refractive-type MLA and planar diffractive-type MLA is still staying at the diffraction-limited scale. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a high numerical aperture (NA) supercritical lens (SCL) array which could achieve a sub-diffraction-limited focal spot lattice in the far field. The intensity distribution for all the focal spots has good uniformity with the lateral size around ${0.45}\lambda {\rm /NA}$0.45λ/NA (0.75X Airy unit). The elementary unit in the SCL array composes a series of concentric belts with a feature size in micrometer scale. By utilizing an ultrafast ultraviolet lithography technique, a centimeter scale SCL array could be successfully patterned within 10 mins. Our results may provide possibilities for the applications in optical nanofabrication, super-resolution imaging, and ultrafine optical manipulation.