Efficient detour-phase encoding of one-dimensional multilevel phase diffractive elements

Appl Opt. 1998 Aug 10;37(23):5454-60. doi: 10.1364/ao.37.005454.

Abstract

We show that detour-phase encoding with a multilevel blaze structure as a carrier grating is especially suited to the implementation of diffractive elements with relatively high complexity in one axis. For our proposal the carrier grating is aligned perpendicularly to this axis. In this way the element can be encoded with a high space-bandwidth product and a high phase resolution by use of a moderate carrier frequency. Moreover, this frequency can be adjusted to isolate the reconstructed field from the noise resulting from high diffraction orders of the carrier grating or caused by etching errors during fabrication.