Aspherical lenses

Aspheric lenses are designed to focus or collimate light without introducing spherical aberration into the transmitted wavefront. For monochromatic sources, spherical aberration is often what prevents a single spherical lens from achieving diffraction limited performance when focusing or collimating light. Thus, an aspheric lens is often the best single element solution for many applications including collimating the output of a fiber or laser diode, coupling light into a fiber, spatial filtering, or imaging light onto a detector.

Silicon Aspheric Lenses are high performance, lightweight solutions for MWIR applications, and are ideal alternatives for costly ZnSe lenses and brittle Germanium lenses.Silicon Aspheric Lenses feature the mechanical and thermal properties required to withstand many of the effects of harsh environments including fluctuations in temperature and pressure. Because silicon is a low density material, these lenses are also ideal for weight-sensitive systems, such as those found in many defense applications.

Germanium Infrared (IR) Aspheric Lenses provide diffraction limited focusing performance over a broad spectral range in the Mid- and Long Wave infrared regions. Ideal for monochromatic light sources, such as quantum cascade lasers, these lenses offer a high performance alternative to standard plano-convex lenses.

Uncoated germanium has transmission of <50%, so custom anti-reflection (AR) coatings should be considered if specifying an uncoated lens. Each BBAR coated lens offers >95% transmission, making it ideal for integration into a variety of OEM applications.