High-throughput 3D printing of customized imaging lens

Recently, 3D printing has gone beyond being an industrial prototyping process and has gradually evolved as the tool to manufacture production-quality parts that are otherwise challenging by using traditional methods. Especially, translating 3D printing technique into the optical realm would dramatically improve the time-and cost-efficiency of customized optical elements, while conventional methods such as multiaxial lathes polishing, magnetorheological finishing, molding techniques are relatively expensive and time consuming. However, 3D printing also suffers from the inherent drawback: the reduced surface quality associated with the stair-stepping effect as a direct result of the layered deposition of the material. In this paper, we have demonstrated a time-and cost-effective single photon micro-stereolithography based 3D printing method to eliminate the layer stair-stepping effect. This method supports not only sub-voxel accuracy (similar to 2 mu m) of the surface in the range of 2 mm diameter, but also features deep sub-wavelength roughness (< 10 nm) of the surfaces and extremely good reproducibility. Furthermore, we designed and rapidly prototyped the aspherical lenses which not only feature low distortion, but also show remarkable optical quality in a broadband wavelength range from 400 nm to 800 nm.