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Abstract:
Optical lenses with an aspherical surface profilecan significantly reduce optical defects such
as spherical aberrations and capture high quality, aberration free images. Conventionally, such
lenses aremade using hard solid materials, such as glass, quartz, fused silica, sapphire and
and often lengthy, arduous, multiple polishing steps. Due to which, the cost of these lenses are
much higher than the cost of their materials. Moreover, these devices are also susceptible to
certain unavoidable defects, e.g. surface roughness, inadvertent scratches and cracks.In this
context,we have demonstrate a simple, cost-effective and robust technique to fabricate variety of
soft optical lenses starting from plano-convex, meniscus, biconvex, aspherical plano-convex
lenses,super-spherical solid immersion to exotic lenses not achieved via conventional methods.
capability of these lenses are tested by capturing micro-objects, and micro biological samples as
for example, LCD display pixel, blood sample, neuron cell, wing of a mosquito, E-coli bacteria,
malaria pathogen etc. This innovation open a brand new window forthe fabrication technique of
soft polymeric optical lenses in a simple, ultra-fast, cost effective and unconventional way. There
is a huge possibilities to scale up the technique for industrial scale production of these lenses.
Images of the fabricated lenses
a b c
d e j f
1mm
Figure 1: Side view of different variety of lenses, (a),(b) are plano-convex lenses
fabricated at different conditions, (c) solid immersion lens, (d) meniscus lens (e) biconvex
our method:
Figure 2, (a) Images of red blood cell captured by our lens using the arrangement
shown below. (b) Image of the same blood cell captured by commercial 100x lens acquired
from Nikon.
From the figure 2, it is clear that the image captured by our lens is more magnified and
having more depth of field than the image captured by the commercial lens. In terms of cost,
camera mount
pin hole
lens
black sheet
object
10x
objective
camera mount
pin hole
lens
black sheet
Figure 3, Module for capturing the images of micro objects using our lenses.
Images of different micro objects and microorganism are shown below:
Pixel of LCD
Neuron cell 10 mm monitor 50 mm Textile fiber
The main advantages of this process, (1) The lenses are made in an inexpensive and single step
process that involves only free surface of liquid, thus effectively eliminating problems related to
surface finish or roughness. (2) The lens parameters (such as curvature, focal length,
magnifications) can easily be tuned just by varying some of the parameters. (3) The proposed
method can be extended for generating various kind of lenses as for example plano-convex,
meniscus lens, biconvex lens, colored lens (Lens- filter system) and finally solid immersion
lenses of almost any desired curvature.(4) The fabrication process is ultrafast which makes it
suitable for scale up and mass production. (5) As the lenses are made up of soft and elastomeric
polymeric material, the chances of getting cracked or scratched on the surfaces are diminished.
(6) Addition of suitable additives to the pre-polymer can be used to tune the optical property of
the lenses (7) The surface energy of the material (PDMS) used for preparing the lenses is very
less (~20 mN/L), maintenance of the surface is easy as compare to conventional solid lenses.