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

The supercritical lens has shown a remarkable capabil-ity of achieving far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing through elaborating a modulated interference effect. Ben-efiting 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 pro-posed and experimentally demonstrated. Such a single-layer supercritical lens consists of multilevel phase configurations patterned with the two-photon polymerization lithogra-phy technique. The simulation and experimental recorded results show that the aberration-compensated supercriti-cal lens with a numerical aperture value of 0.63 could achieve a far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing property within 20 degrees field of view at a wavelength of lambda = 633 nm. This monochromatic aberration-compensated supercritical lens with single-layer configuration indicates excellent potential in the development of laser scanning ultrahigh optical stor-age and label free super-resolution imaging. (c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group

Automated summary

The supercritical lens has shown remarkable capability in achieving far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing through a modulated interference effect. A new aberration-compensated supercritical lens with a single-layer configuration is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. With a numerical aperture value of 0.63, this aberration-compensated supercritical lens achieves far-field sub-diffraction limited focusing within a 20 degrees field of view at a wavelength of λ = 633 nm.