10.1117/2.1201409.

005600

Controlling light with freeform

optics
Vladimir Oliker
New tools can be used to design optical systems for redirecting and
redistributing light in a prescribed manner.
When light sources and/or targets and input and/or output
radiation patterns lack special (i.e., rotational or rectangular)
symmetries, freeform optical surfaces must be used in their design. In such cases, traditional designsconstrained by the use
of a particular symmetrymay lead to highly energy inefficient
devices. Freeform lenses and mirrors are surfaces that are designed without any a priori assumed symmetry. They therefore
provide significantly more degrees of freedom to create an optical system with the desired characteristics. Many applications in
non-imaging and imaging opticssuch as solar collection, illumination, laser beam shaping, and antenna designmay benefit
from the use of freeform optics. In these applications, the optical
surface (or a system of surfaces that may be lenses or mirrors)
is required to redirect and reshape the radiance pattern of the
source so that the output irradiance is concentrated onto a given
target set and has a prescribed pattern. Such design problems are
known as prescribed irradiance problems1 (an example of one
is shown in Figure 1).
In the geometrical optics approximation and for small sources
and collimated beams, a systematic application of ray tracing
equations and energy conservation law reduces prescribed irradiance problems for freeform optical surfaces to establishing
conditions for solvability and finding numerical solutions to
strongly nonlinear second-order partial differential equations.15
Alternative formulations of such design problems are also
sometimes possible. For example, when the desired irradiance
pattern is in the far-field, or when two refracting/reflecting
surfaces are used, we have previously shown that the design
problems can be formulated as linear programming problems.68
The same formulation for a single lens in a near-field case,
however, is impossible.9 In either of these formulations, if rotational symmetry is not assumed, the resulting equations are
far from standard. The theory and computational methods for
reliably solving these equations require the most advanced

Figure 1. Schematic drawing of a single-element plano-freeform lens

to be determined in a prescribed irradiance problem. A collimated light
beam with cross section propagates in direction z. The goal of the
design is to determine the lens R; which intercepts the beam and redistributes the light with prescribed irradiance distribution over a given
region Ta0 in 3D space. In the figure, for simplicity, Ta0 is on some
plane 0 and the input and output irradiance patterns are not shown.
The plane 0 can be replaced by a surface, and then Ta0 is a region on
that surface. Only the (active) curved side of the lens is shown. The
inactive planar (left) side of the lens is not shown. The lens is described
by the function z.x/; which needs to be determined. Only two complete
paths of light rays between and 0 are shown.

mathematical tools, many of which have not yet been developed. Finding numerical solutions to such problems is therefore
particularly difficult. Reasonably accurate discretization of such
design problems, because of their underlying strong nonlinearities, requires very fine meshes. These meshes represent the light
source and its radiation pattern, the target set, the required target
radiance, and the solution. The algorithms and their implementation codes must therefore solve a large number of equations
that relate the data on the source with data on the target, and are
consequently very complex.
We have recently developed a very general approach
to the design of freeform optics for prescribed irradiance
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Figure 2. The input beam is a circular collimated beam of radius 4.05mm with uniform irradiance propagating in the direction of the z-axis (east).
A cross section of the beam is shown in (a). We want to design a lens creating a gray-scale image of Mona Lisa on the plane 0 as shown in (b); the
p
p
z-axis in (b) is directed north. The dimensions of the rectangle are 55  22:7mm. The unit normal to the plane of the rectangle is .1= 2; 0; 1= 2/.
The side view of the designed freeform lens redirecting and redistributing the radiance is shown in (c); the z-axis in (c) is directed east. Panel (d)
shows the redistributed light irradiance in 3D space producing a synthetic image of Mona Lisa. The z-axis in (d) is directed north. Observe that
(d) shows the (mirror) reflected image of Mona Lisa. This is because the lens is between the z D 0 plane and the plane 0 ; the lens is not shown
in (d). The illuminated side is visible from the z D 0 plane. Because of transparency it can also be seen from the top of (d), but the observer sees the
reflected image. The figures are not to scale. No smoothing or despeckling was performed on the image.
problems.3, 68, 10 This approach is based on rigorous physical
and geometric principles, combined with ideas from calculus of
variations, as well as on novel, extremely efficient, and provably convergent computational methods that solve very large
systems of nonlinear equations. Our approach does not require
any symmetry assumptions, and produces a solution for a design problem that approximates the exact solution with any a
priori given accuracy, i.e., it effectively finds the exact solution.
In addition, the solution does not depend on ad hoc constructions or on optimization of ad hoc merit functions.
The methods we have developed are applicable to near- and
far-field problems, and can be used to design optical systems
with one and two freeform lenses or reflectors. With two lenses
(or reflectors) it is possible to control the output irradiance and
the optical path length. Our methods, in their present form,
can be applied to optical systems with small or collimated nonisotropic sources, with no restrictions on the target shape and
irradiance distribution. For optical systems with one and two
lenses, we have implemented these new developments into
codes, and we now have efficient, accurate tools for solving
important classes of prescribed irradiance problems.
We have applied our methodology to the design problem illustrated in Figure 1, i.e., to design a freeform single lens that
converts a collimated light beam into an output beam, which
irradiates with a prescribed pattern at a given near-field target

in 3D space. The quantitative conditions for the existence of solutions to this problem have previously been established.11 For
this problem, our code took three hours and four minutes on a
standard desktop computer to solve 2.840236926  109 nonlinear
equations. We modeled the input beamshown in Figure 2(a)
with 247,969 point sources that radiated in the z-direction and
were uniformly distributed over a circular disk of radius 4.05mm
on the plane D fz D 0g centered at (0, 0). The total radiance of
the input beam was equal to the total required radiance distribution on the target. We modeled the detector screen as a set of
11,454 pixels that were uniformly distributed over the rectangle
shown in Figure 2(b).
We used numerical tracing of light fluxes to simulate physical propagation of light through the lens. Instead of tracing weighted single rays, however, we developed an original
method for tracing fluxes that are associated with area elements,
into which the entire cross section of the input beam was decomposed. For this particular example, we used 494,214 of these area
elements. This task was completed in eight minutes and seven
seconds of central processing unit time on a standard laptop.
The total flux incident on the lens was redistributed on the target
image, and thus we achieved a 100% collected energy efficiency
for the designed lens. The relative root mean square radiation
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This project was financially supported in part by the US Air Force

Office of Scientific Research.
Author Information
Figure 3. The original (prescribed) image for the checkerboard is on
the right. The checkerboard on the left is obtained by tracing the fluxes
through the designed lens shown in Figure 4. The lens reshapes a parallel, circular light beam with uniform intensity into a light beam generating the pattern on the left on a detection screen perpendicular to
the z-axis at 150mm from the reference plane D fz D 0g. The input beam is the same as in the case of the image of Mona Lisa: see
Figure 2(a). The figures are not to scale. No smoothing or despeckling
was performed on the left image.

Vladimir Oliker
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
Vladimir Oliker received his PhD in mathematics from
Leningrad University, USSR (former Soviet Union). He has published over a hundred papers in the fields of pure and applied
mathematics. Since 1984 he has been developing theoretical and
computational methods for the design of freeform optics.
References

Figure 4. Side view of the lens. The z-axis (blue in the color version) is
directed northeast.
deviation was about 6%. This parameter indicates the numerical
validation of the radiance distribution accuracy of the designed
lens, relative to the prescribed radiance values.
We also performed a test of the resolution capabilities of our
code on a checkerboard (see Figure 3). For this test, our code took
three hours and one minute of computing time on a standard
desktop computer to solve 2.031362048  109 nonlinear equations.
We have developed a novel approach to the design of freeform
optical surfaces that redirect and redistribute irradiance in a prescribed manner. We have illustrated our approach by designing
an optical system with a collimated light beam and a single lens,
which transforms the incident light so that a synthetic image of
Mona Lisa is created on a skewed detection screen. A test of our
codes resolution capabilities was performed on a checkerboard.
The computed results were validated by numerical tracing of
fluxes through the designed optical systems. We now plan to
develop implementations of our approach into codes for the design of systems with freeform reflectors, in particular, freeform
reflector antennae. We expect that the software we have developed will be a useful tool for engineers and researchers working
on design problems in optics and electromagnetics. The work
presented here is based on a previous paper.10

1. R. Winston, J. C. Minano,
and P. Bentez, Nonimaging Optics, Elsevier Academic
Press, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2005, with contributions by N. Shatz and J. Bortz.
2. B. S. Westcott, Shaped Reflector Antenna Design, Research Studies Press, Letchworth, UK, 1983.
3. V. I. Oliker, Mathematical aspects of design of beam shaping surfaces in geometrical

optics, in M. Kirkilionis, S. Kromker,

R. Rannacher, and F. Tomi (eds.), Trends in
Nonlinear Analysis, pp. 191222, Springer-Verlag, 2002.
4. H. Ries and J. Muschaweck, Tailored freeform optical surfaces, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 19,
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irradiance properties, Opt. Eng. 53, p. 031302, 2014. doi:10.1117/1.OE.53.3.031302
6. T. Glimm and V. I. Oliker, Optical design of single reflector systems and the Monge
Kantorovich mass transfer problem, J. Math. Sci. 117, pp. 40964108, 2003.
7. T. Glimm and V. Oliker, Optical design of two-reflector systems, the Monge
Kantorovich mass transfer problem and Fermats principle, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 53,
pp. 12551278, 2004.
8. V. I. Oliker, Designing freeform lenses for intensity and phase control of coherent
light with help from geometry and mass transport, Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 201,
pp. 10131045, 2011.
9. T. Graf and V. I. Oliker, An optimal mass transport approach to the near-field reflector problem in optical design, Inverse Prob. 28, p. 025001, 2012. doi:10.1088/02665611/28/2/025001
10. V. I. Oliker and B. Cherkasskiy, Controlling light with freeform optics: recent
progress in computational methods for optical design of freeform lenses with prescribed
irradiance properties, Proc. SPIE 9191, p. 919105, 2014. doi:10.1117/12.2063355
11. V. I. Oliker, J. Rubinstein, and G. Wolansky, Supporting quadric method in optical
design of freeform lenses for precise illumination control of a collimated light beam, Adv.
Appl. Mathem., to appear.

c 2014 SPIE