Advanced Analog Micro-lens Technology

This proposal will demonstrate the feasibility of producing diffraction-limited anamorphic microlens arrays for Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors used on very large aperture astronomical telescopes with multiple off-axis laser guide stars. A high-quality lenslet arrays will be fabricated with gray scale mask lithography and reactive chemical etching. Four advanced gray scale photolithographic mask technologies will be evaluated. Two will be selected for gray scale mask fabrication. A selection between the two masks will be made from the quality of the lenslets they produce in photoresist. The best performing photoresist lenslets will be reactive ion etching at our teaming partner’s facility, MEMS Optical, Inc. to produce finished micro-lens array.