Demonstration of an optical pipeline adder and design concepts for its microintegration

A fully functional optical pipeline adder based on systolic arrays and optical symbolic substitution (OSS) is demonstrated. By pupil division four OSS-rules are applied to a dataplane in one single optical path. The design concept includes the possibility of microintegration by adapting the modular system design to features of typical micro-optical devices.     

Microlens arrays for confocal microscopy

A new; high resolution measuring system based on confocal microscopy has been developed for the evaluation of microlens arrays; in particular for applications in confocal microscopy itself. Lenslet arrays for parallel scanning and processing in confocal microscopy were designed as phase-matched Fresnel lenslets and fabricated by direct laser writing. Replica arrays were produced by ultraviolet embossing and hot embossing techniques. Fabricated arrays with a numerical aperture of 0.28 exhibited near diffraction limited performance and a focal length standard deviation of 120 nm in a nominal value of 250 μm. The technique developed represents a convenient and powerful technique for the characterization of lenslet arrays in general.     

Characteristics of photonic nanojets from two-layer dielectric hemisphere

The properties of the photonic nanojet generated by a two-layer dielectric microsphere are studied. Simulation results indicate that this novel structure can generate a photonic nanojet outside its volume when the refractive index contrast relative to the background medium is higher than 2:1 in the condition of plane wave incidence. When the refractive index is smaller than 2, we show that an ultralong nanojet generated by the two-layer hemisphere has an extension of 28.2 wavelengths, and compared with the homogeneous dielectric hemisphere, it has superior performance in jet length and focal distance. Its dependence on the configuration and refractive index is investigated numerically. According to the simulation of the two-layer dielectric microsphere, a photonic nanojet with a full width at half maximum(FWHM) less than 1/2 wavelength is obtained and the tunable behaviors of the photonic nanojet are demonstrated by changing the reflective indices of the material or radius contrast ratio.