Enabling the production of aspheric glass lenses with diffractive structures

The demand for complex-shaped optical components is rising rapidly, driven by their significant advantages over traditional optics. A great example are lenses that combine aspherical surfaces and diffraction gratings. These can eliminate spherical as well as chromatic aberrations in imaging optics and can therefore replace multi-lens optical systems. Although glass aspheric lenses or lenses with diffraction gratings can be manufactured by various production technologies, the production of glass lenses that combine both was not possible until now. In this paper, the development of a production method of such lenses using precision glass moulding is presented.