Pixelated micro-polarizer array is an attractive polarization imaging device because of its real-time fully detecting capability to Stokes parameters and high integration level. However, this micro-device is commonly fabricated by electron beam lithography, thus is often high-cost. Since periodic unit of this device is a 2×2 array of four types of one-dimensional (1D) gratings with different orientations (0°, 45°, 90°, 135°), a low-cost grating fabrication technique, interference lithography (IL), is possible to be used to fabricate this device. In this research, a four-steps exposure patterning method of micro-polarizer array based on single Lloyd’s mirror interferometer IL is developed. This interferometer is composed by two perpendicular parts: a mirror and a photoresist holder, and a 1D grating parallel with mirror can be fabricated in the exposure region on photoresist through lithography. A Cr-based mask, whose transparent pattern is a square array of square windows with 15×15 μm2 window size and 17 μm window spacing, is introduced and clamped onto the photoresist to cut exposure region. In four exposure steps, each 15×15 μm2 quadrant area of a polarizer array with 2 μm quadrant spacing will be exposed on photoresist, respectively. Between two exposure steps, mask and photoresist substrate need to be simultaneously horizontal rotated, to adjust the orientation of grating fabricated in next exposed quadrant on photoresist. Based on this method, we fabricated the single-state patterned micro-polarizer array, which effectively controls the cost and fabrication cycle. The experimental results show that the photoresist grating within a single window has stable structure, uniform period and good directivity.
Periodic nanoscale array structures are of great importance in various fields including photonic crystals, diffraction gratings, etc. In this study, a dielectric-film-based polarization modulation scheme on an orthogonal two-axis Lloyd’s mirrors interference system was proposed for patterning high-uniformity nanoscale two-dimensional (2D) grating over a large area. We established a beam reflection model of three media-layer structure of air-dielectric film (MgF2)-metal substrate (Al) and calculated the integrative amplitude reflection coefficients. We systematically analyzed the spatial polarization states of the interference beams and determined the optimal exposure conditions to automatically eliminate the additional interference at certain incident angles. We plotted the optimal period of fabricable 2D grating at different thickness of dielectric film MgF2, where a thickness of 66.3 nm was selected for experimental demonstration. Then, 2D gratings with various periods of 740 nm, 780 nm, 1000 nm, and 1250 nm were fabricated, which presented a high consistency with the simulation results and revealed the fabrication ability over a period range from 730 nm to 840 nm. This dielectric-film based polarization modulation mechanism enables to extend the fabricable 2D grating with a smaller pitch, which is corresponding to a larger area. The proposed dielectric-thin-film-based polarization modulation mechanism provides a promising approach for fabricating large-area, high-uniformity, 2D-crossed gratings with a high throughput.
The planer grating with large area plays an important role in the optical encoder for large stroke measurement. Compared with the conventional fabrication techniques such as interference lithography and mechanically ruling for large-area manufacture, splicing small-area grating units into a large integral mosaic grating is promising to reduce the technical difficulty and time-consumption. We proposed a novel grating splicing method to construct large-area mosaic grating applicable for optical encoder. The splicing apparatus is capable of providing four degree-of-freedom including one outof-plane straight motion (ΔZ) and three rotation motions (Δθx, Δθy, Δθz) for mechanically adjusting the grating units. The diffracted beams from the spliced gratings are utilized to guide the adjustment, i.e., zero-order diffracted beams for ΔZ, Δθx, Δθy and first-order diffracted beams for Δθz, respectively. The diffracted-beams orientations of the first grating were adopted as the basic reference, and the posture of the other gratings are continuously adjusted by matching the position of the diffracted beams. Five grating units with 20×20 mm2 area and 1 μm period were spliced together. Finally, a coordinate measuring machine was utilized to evaluate the flatness of the mosaic gratings, showing a good flatness as small as ~60 μm. It is demonstrated that our proposed splicing method is promising to achieve good flatness of mosaic grating potentially applied for large-stroke optical encoder.
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