Designing Freeform Lenses for Intensity and Phase Control of Coherent Light with Help from Geometry and Mass Transport

We study here the problem of determining a system of two refractive interfaces transforming a plane wavefront of a given shape and radiation intensity into a coherent output plane wavefront with prescribed output position, shape and intensity. Such interfaces can be refracting surfaces of two different lenses or of one lens. In geometrical optics approximation, the analytic formulation of this problem in both cases requires construction of maps with controlled Jacobian. Though this Jacobian can be expressed as a second order partial differential equation of Monge-Ampère type for a scalar function defining one of the refracting surfaces, its analysis is not straightforward. In this paper we use a geometric approach for reformulating the problem in certain associated measures and defining weak solutions. Existence and uniqueness of weak solutions in Lipschitz classes for both cases are established by variational methods. Our results show, in particular, that two types of interfaces exist in each case for the same data: one of these types always consists of two interfaces, one of which is concave or convex and the second convex or concave, while the interfaces of the second type may be neither convex nor concave. The availability of a design with convex/concave lenses is particularly important for fabrication. The truly geometric nature of this problem permits its statement and investigation in mathbb R^N+1, N geqq 1{mathbb {R}^{N+1},, N geqq 1} .