Design of cascaded diffractive optical elements generating different intensity distributions at several operating wavelengths

We consider the design of cascaded diffractive optical elements (DOEs) for generating specified intensity distributions for several incident beams with different wavelengths. For each incident beam with a given wavelength, the cascaded DOE forms a different specified intensity distribution. The problem of DOE design is formulated as the problem of minimizing a functional that depends on the functions of diffractive microrelief height of the cascaded DOE and represents the deviations of the intensity distributions generated at the operating wavelengths from the specified ones. Explicit expressions are obtained for the derivatives of the functional, and on this basis, a gradient method for calculating a cascaded DOE is formulated. The proposed gradient method is used for the calculation of cascaded DOEs focusing radiation of three different wavelengths into different areas. In particular, the calculation of a cascaded DOE generating a complex color image of parrots is considered. The presented numerical simulation results demonstrate high performance of the proposed method. •Design of spectral cascaded diffractive optical elements (DOEs) is considered.•Such DOEs generate different intensity distributions at different wavelengths.•Compact explicit expressions for error functional derivatives are obtained.•As example, spectral DOEs generating complex color image of parrots are designed.•Numerical simulations demonstrate high performance of the proposed approach.