Design And Charactering Of Large Aperture Micro-Structural Planar Photon Sieves

Photon sieve is a newly developed imaging device in recent years which has the advantages of small size, light weight and wide spectral range from infrared to extreme ultraviolet and soft X-rays over the conventional glass-based refractive optics. In this thesis, the fundamental principle and mechanism of designing (including both analytical and professional software), UV fabrication technique, tolerance analysis, and experimental imaging results are investigated and presented. The detailed contents include: (1) A generalized theoretical model that is suitable for high numerical aperture and any wavelength band is set up, which forms the theoretical basis for the optical design of the photon sieves. (2) The imaging characteristics of the photon sieve and the optimization designing technique are presented in which the effects of different arrangements (or density function) of pinholes are investigated in detail. (3) The tolerances of the photon sieve parameters are studied using the Monte-Carlo method. The detailed tolerances of the pinhole sizes and the radial position are obtained. (4) A novel method of designing large aperture, high numerical aperture photon sieve using multi-region technique is proposed for the first time. The large multi-region photon sieve with aperture of 50mm, 125mm and 420mm are designed and demonstrated. (5) A novel technique of using ZEMAX to calculate and design photon sieves is proposed and performed. The results of using ZEMAX for calculating elliptical pinhole photon sieves and the oblique incidence are also given. (6) Two large aperture (D125mm) multi-region photon sieves with 3-region and 4-region photon sieves were fabricated using UV lithography for the first time. The imaging quality of the fabricated photon sieves agrees well with the design specifications.