采用衍射掩模产生白光横向平顶光束

白光横向平顶光束在定向背光式自由立体显示器中有重要应用.本文提出一种采用带蝶形小孔阵列的衍射掩模片获得白光横向平顶光束的方法.根据广义惠更斯-菲涅耳衍射积分和多波长叠加原理,推导出光强分布计算式.设计一套实验装置,数值模拟并实验验证出射光束在不同距离的横向光强分布以及小孔蝶形凹度(蝶形中心高度与边长的比值)对横向光强分布的影响.结果表明:当选择小孔蝶形凹度为0.50—0.66时,可以得到平顶因子F 0.89的白光横向平顶光束,横向平顶光束的宽度随着传输距离的增大而增大,而平顶因子基本不变.实验还发现柱面透镜的折射色散和衍射色散可以互相抵消,使白光横向平顶光束基本无色散.

Horizontal white light flat-topped beams produced by the diffraction mask

The flat-topped beam is a special beam with wide applications in the directional backlight autostereoscopic display, and it is used as a directional backlight in the horizontal direction. However, it is still challenge to white light flat-topped beams with the traditional flat-topped beam shaper. In this paper, it is proposed that diffraction mask with butterfly-shaped hole arrays and cylindrical lens be used to produce the horizontal flat-topped white beams. The surface of the LCD backlight mask is covered by a layer of diffraction mask, where the butterfly-shaped holes are arranged in line along the vertical direction. Simultaneously, the height and width, hole center height are kept identical, and the ratio between the center depth and the perimeter of butterfly-shape hole is defined as the concavity. A flat convex cylindrical lens is placed in front of diffraction mask gaplessly. The uniform light field from LCD backlight is transformed into the white light flat-topped beams and projected on the receiving screen by the diffraction mask and cylindrical lens. Based on the Huygens-Fresnel diffraction integral, the intensity distribution formula of diffraction of the single wavelength light source on the receiving screen is derived. Furthermore, the intensity distribution formula on the screen is derived by super positioning the multiple wavelengths. The proposed method is verified by both numerical simulation and experimental validation. Numerical simulations elucidate the effects of the different transmission distance and butterfly hole concavity on the white light flat-topped beam flat-topped factor. The stimulated results show that the propagation distance does not influence the white light beam transverse intensity distribution characteristics of flat top. With the beam propagation distance increasing, the horizontal width of flat-topped beam becomes larger. When the concavity of the butterfly hole decreases, light intensity distribution shifts from Gaussian to flat type. However, the flat-topped factor decreases when the butterfly concavity is too small. The optimal concavity varies from 0.4 to 0.6, where the flattened factor of the transverse flat-topped beams reaches 0.89. In the experiments, films are produced with the diffraction of butterfly hole array mask. The height and width of butterfly are both 48 μm, and the concavities of the butterfly are 1, 0.83, 0.66 and 0.83 respectively. The cylindrical lens adopts PMMA cylindrical lens grating plate, with a thickness of 8 mm, a grating density for 18 line/inch, and the cylindrical lens curvature radius R is 2.67 mm. The experimental results show that the beam transmission is consistent with the result of numerical simulation. When concavity of the butterfly is 0.5, the flat factors of the white light horizontal of flat-topped beams are higher than 0.89 in a range from 500 mm to 2000 mm. Moreover, we also discuss the dispersion effects of shaft flat-topped beams and off-axis flat-topped beams, showing that the refraction and dispersion of the cylindrical lens can cancel out each other, so that the horizontal flat-toped white beams is basically dispersionless.