Abstract

We present a procedure for designing rotationally symmetric pupil-plane masks to control the three-dimensional light-intensity distribution near focus. Our method is based on the use of a series of figures of merit that are properly defined to describe the effect of general complex pupil functions. As a practical implementation, we have applied our method to obtain superresolving continuous smoothly varying phase-only filters. The advantages of these kinds of filters are that they do not produce energy absorption and they are easy to build with a phase-controlling device such as a deformable mirror. Results of comparisons between the performance of our method and that of other phase-filter designs are provided.

© 2003 Optical Society of America

Discrete continuous-phase superresolving filters

Sumei Zhou and Changhe Zhou
Opt. Lett. 29(23) 2746-2748 (2004)

Simple expressions for performance parameters of complex filters, with applications to super-Gaussian phase filters

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