Fabrication of Microlenses for High Resolution Light Microscopy

当透镜及其焦距极小时，所有的像差都会随透镜的大小而变化，并在某一时刻变得可以忽略。为了获得最高的分辨率，人们希望拥有深紫外光和高数值光圈的透镜。传统的透镜制造方法已被证明不足以提供衍射受限的深紫外光透镜，这些透镜的重复性足以用于半导体工业的计量应用。这里提出的微透镜具有以下优点：极高的重复性；深紫外光和大数值孔径是可能的；它们没有抛光曲面，它们潜在地受到衍射限制；尽管它们只由一种类型的玻璃(熔融二氧化硅，UV级)制成，但它们的带宽相对较宽。应用包括半导体计量和检测；生物和医学显微镜；以及光纤耦合。

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.