Design and Lithographic Fabrication of Elliptical Zone Plate Array with High Fill Factor

An elliptical zone plate (EZP) array is important in off-axis optical systems because it provides two advantages. First, the residual beam and the main source are not focused in the same direction and second, the light from the observation plane is not reflected back towards the beam source. However, the fill factor of the previous EZP array was about 76% which was a little low. Hence, this EZP array could not collect the maximum amount of illumination light, which affected the overall optical performance of the lens array. In this study, we propose a new EZP array design with a 97.5% fill factor used in off-axis imaging system for enhancement of brightness and contrast. Then, direct laser lithography was used to fabricate the high fill factor EZP array by moving the XY linear stage of the system in a zigzag motion. The imaging properties of the proposed EZP array were experimentally verified at the focal plane and compared with the previous model.