Abstract

The design and optimization of meso-scopic diffractive optical elements (DOEs) is complicated by the fact that electromagnetic models of diffraction must be used to accurately analyze the behavior of candidate DOE profiles. Although recent years have seen steady progress in the development of electromagnetic models, in particular those formulated for the analysis of finite and aperiodic DOEs, few of these methods have been applied to DOE synthesis. This is due, in large part, to the computational resources needed to implement electromagnetic models of diffraction. For instance, the time required to analyze a DOE using scalar models is typically on the order of fractions of a second, while that for electromagnetic models ranges from several minutes to a few hours. As a result, optimization algorithms developed for scalar applications are generally of limited value in the electromagnetic domain due to their inability to arrive at an optimal solution in reasonable time frames. As a result, in this paper we present an optimization algorithm developed explicitly for electromagnetic applications.

© 2000 Optical Society of America