Geltech Aspheres

• High quality optical glass lenses
• Custom designs available
• Numerical aperture up to 0.83
• Diameters from 0.250 mm to 25.0 mm
• Diffraction-limited performance
• Available in standard and custom housings
• LightPath's Aspheric Lens Optical Design Specifications

For today’s sophisticated and compact laser systems, aspheres are the most powerful lenses for managing laser light. In these systems, spherical aberration is the most prevalent performance detractor. It arises from the use of spherical surfaces and artificially limits focusing and collimating accuracy.

Although it has been known for centuries that spherical geometry is not optimal for refracting light, the expense of fabricating non-spherical (aspheric) surfaces has inhibited their use. With the breakthrough of LightPath’s glass molding technology, this optimal lens geometry has become a reality.

Glass Aspheres for Laser Tools

• Single lens provides same performance as doublets & triplets
• Reduces system cost through simple, compact design
• Molded lenses for greater performance repeatability
• Designed for high volume production
• View LightPath's Glass Aspheres for Laser Tools datasheet

LightPath Technologies is pleased to announce introduction of a new line of molded glass aspheric lenses designed specifically for the Laser Tool market.

In today’s manufacturing environment, laser tools are a common method for generating guidelines and measuring distances or surface profiles. These tools include laser levels, laser pointers, line projectors, laser scanners, and laser trackers. LightPath’s aspheric lenses are designed for use in today’s high performance laser tools and measurement systems.

Aspheric lenses provide a single lens solution to laser projection. These aspheric lenses provide a cost savings over spherical doublets and triplets without sacrificing performance. Time consuming and expensive mounting and alignment of doublets and triplets can be replaced with a simple single lens mount. Aspheric lenses also have higher transmission than multi-lens systems due to less optical material and allow more compact packaging to be produced.

Expanded Moldable Glass Catalog

LightPath Technologies is pleased to announce the expansion of our Moldable Glass Catalog to include two new glasses, D-ZK3 and D-ZLaF52LA. These two glasses allow additional possibilities for design of custom aspheric lenses.

Both D-ZK3 and D-ZLAF52LA are RoHS compliant and have been fully qualified with LightPath’s proprietary molding process and standard Anti-Reflective (AR) coatings. The D-ZK3 glass is best suited for those applications that require a low cost glass for higher volume manufacturing. The D-ZLaF52LA glass has a higher index of refraction than ECO-550 and is best suited for those applications that require a higher index and need to maintain RoHS compliance.

These new glasses provide greater durability than LightPath’s ECO-550 glass due to a higher glass transition point. LightPath has started to incorporate these new glasses into its aspheric lens catalog with the introduction of its new Laser Tool line of aspheric lenses.

View LightPath's Expanded Moldable Glass Catalog

Mounted Aspheric Lenses

• Cost effective solution for mounting Geltech aspheres
• Easy to handle optical assembly
• Durable stainless-steel housing
• Threaded extension for easy mounting
• Compact size
• View LightPath's Mounted Aspheres datasheet

LightPath’s line of mounted aspheric lenses makes assembly work quick and easy. The housings are made from durable stainless steel, which is suitable for welding or soldering. The mounts also have a threaded exterior, allowing you to simply screw the lens into place. Standard design mounts are available for 24 of our most popular lens types, but any of the lenses in the catalog can be mounted into a holder of your preference.

Asphere Customization Capabilities

Molded lenses are used in a variety of photonic products: barcode scanners, laser diode to fiber couplings, optical data storage, and medical lasers, to name a few. In many of these applications, the material of choice is optical glass because of its durability and performance stability over a wide environmental range. High power transmittance is also an added advantage.

Anti-Reflective Coatings

LightPath offers a variety of multilayer broadband coatings to reduce the back reflection from a nominal 6% for uncoated lenses. The choice of which AR coating is appropriate depends on the type of glass the lens is made from and the wavelength at which the lens will be used. LightPath’s rigorous qualification process ensures that all of the standard coatings will pass the abrasion and adhesion resistance requirements of ISO+9211-4-1996. LightPath is happy to provide any AR coatings based on specific requirements.

View LightPath's Standard & Available Anti-Reflective Coatings

Aspheric Hybrid Optics

LightPath can extend the range of optimization on a lens by molding a diffractive pattern in the surface of the lens. This allows for a greater range of wavelength optimization and better achromatic performance.

Learn more about LightPath's Aspheric Hybrid Optics

Molded In Place (MIP) Lenses

LightPath’s lenses can be molded directly into metallic holders, allowing the lenses to be welded or soldered into the package and eliminating the need to use epoxy. This can be an ideal solution for high volume automated assembly or in applications where strict outgassing requirements preclude the use of epoxy adhesives.

Blue Laser Collimating Lens

LightPath’s 352673 molded glass aspheric lens is optimized to collimate Nichia’s® blue laser diode, and is manufactured and designed to meet extremely stringent optical standards.

View LightPath's Blue Laser Collimating Lens datasheet

Molded Glass Lens Arrays

By utilizing LightPath’s molded lens technology it is now possible to manufacture lens arrays with high precision. Unlike etched lens arrays, where there is a great deal of non-uniformity from array to array, molding will consistently produce the same structure and performance from prototype to large production builds. Consistent focal lengths and form ease the manufacturing requirement for the end user. The molding technology also allows optical designs that require greater sag (lens thickness) such as high numerical aperture collimators for laser diode arrays. Lens arrays can be produced for direct coupling (finite conjugative) or collimating applications. Pitch tolerances are typically less than one micron and lenses can also be placed with varying pitches across the array.

Molded Anamorphic Optics

Most commercially available laser diodes project an elliptical beam due to the diode junction having a rectangular shape. This elliptical beam can create difficulties in many applications, such as laser to fiber coupling. LightPath’s lens technology creates a simple solution to circularize and collimate many of the available laser diodes. By positioning the lens very close to the laser chip itself, these lenses provide a small circular and collimated beam, providing a very elegant and compact solution.

Compliant Aspheres

In addition to the ECO-550 glass, LightPath has introduced two new lines of molded glass aspheric lenses utilizing the D-ZK3 and D-ZLaF52LA glasses. All three glass types are lead-free alternatives to traditional moldable glasses. LightPath's ECO-550, D-ZK3, and D-ZLaF52LA glasses are fully RoHS compliant, in accordance with the new European restrictions on hazardous substances.

The new lenses will be drop-in replacements for the existing LightPath aspheric lenses and will have the same first order optical properties. To view specifications for LightPath's RoHS compliant aspheres, please see pages 13-33 of our product catalog.