High-harmonic diffractive lens color compensation

Large diameter, high-harmonic diffractive lenses could find applications in future space telescopes. Residual chromatic aberrations from these lenses can cause significant blurring. Solutions to reduce chromatic dispersion and other aberrations to diffraction-limited performance are discussed. A design example based on a 240-mm-diameter, 1-m focal length multi-order diffractive engineered lens operating over the astronomical R-Band (589–727 nm) is presented. The design example uses a relay subsystem with four times smaller diameter than the primary. This color corrector includes both refractive and diffractive optical elements and reduces the longitudinal chromatic aberrations by more than a factor of 30 compared to the primary lens alone, while maintaining the effective focal length and numerical aperture of the system.