Manufacture of pupil filters for 3D beam shaping

In a previous work we presented a new method for binarizing pupil filters designed to control the three-dimensional (3D) irradiance distribution in the focal volume of apodized systems. The method is based in the fact that the 3D amplitude point spread function of an axially-symmetrical system can be recovered entirely from a one-dimensional (1D) set of regularly spaced amplitude samples. Hence we proposed the use of 1D iterative Fourier transform algorithm to binarize a, properly mapped, version of the amplitude transmittance of the filter. The binary masks obtained consist of a set of opaque and transparent concentric annular zones. In this paper we have built two of these masks with opposing properties and we have experimentally verified their abilities in a focusing system. These experimental results strongly agree previous theoretical predictions.