Fabrication of Microlenses for High Resolution Light Microscopy

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When a lens and it's focal length are extremely small, all aberrations scale with the size of the lens and at some point become ignorable. For highest resolution it is desirable to have a deep ultraviolet and high numerical aperture lens. Conventional lens making methods have proved inadequate for providing diffraction limited deep UV lenses which are reproducible enough to be used in metrology applications in the semiconductor industry. Microlenses as proposed here have the following advantages: Extremely reproducible; deep ultraviolet and large numerical apertures are possible; they have no polished curved surfaces they are potentially diffraction limited; and they are relatively broad band although they are made from only one type of glass (fused silica, UV grade). Applications include semiconductor metrology and inspection; biological and medical microscopy; and fiber optic coupling.