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The radially polarized beams are modulated by phase-type optical needle modulators can be tightly focused to create needle-like focused beams, which are called optical needles. The use of optical needles with different resolutions and focal depths as direct writing heads for laser direct lithography enables periodic, cross-scale processing of high aspect ratio micro-nano structures with different line widths. The design of the phase-type optical needle modulators is the key to obtain optical needles with different resolutions and focal depths. However, the existing conventional methods for designing phase-type optical needle modulators rely on the physical model for generating optical needles and the defined fitness function, which makes their design time long and not adaptive. Based on the deep learning, a novel phase-type optical needle modulator design (PONMD) approach is proposed in this paper. The results show that the PONMD method takes 0.5526ms to design a phase-type optical needle modulator, and the similarity between the designed and target values is 96.73%. Compared with the conventional methods, the time consumption is reduced by about 8 orders of magnitude, and the similarity is improved by 11.19%. The PONMD approach has the advantages of adaptability, more efficient, less time-consuming, and less computational resource-consuming.

In this manuscript, a method of generating an ultra-long optical needle (depth-to-width ratio 37.5:1) is proposed and demonstrated by focusing an azimuthally polarized beam. In theory, the action mechanism between the incident beam and the amplitude modulation element, the spiral phase modulation element, the focusing lens were studied based on the Richards and Wolf's theory. The relationship between the intensity distribution of the optical needle and the structure parameter of the element were obtained, thus leading to the complete design model and design standard. In experiment, the annular amplitude modulation element and spiral phase modulation element were fabricated by lithography. The optical needle was obtained based on a custom-designed optical setup in our laboratory. The optical system consists of an annular aperture (3.9-mm inner diameter, 80-μm annular width), a spiral phase plate (topological charge of 1), and an objective lens with numerical aperture of 0.95. Finally, an optical needle with a subwavelength size (0.416λ) and an ultra-long depth of focus (15.6λ) was obtained, showing an excellent agreement with our theoretical model.

This paper analyzes the effect of polarization and the incident angle on the contrasts of interference patterns in three-beam interference lithography. A non-coplanar laser interference system was set up to simulate the relationship between contrast, beam polarization, and the incident angle. Different pattern periods require different incident angles, which means different contrast losses in interference lithography. Two different polarization modes were presented to study the effects of polarization with different incident angles based on theoretical analysis simulations. In the case of the co-directional component TE polarization mode, it was demonstrated that the pattern contrast decreases with the increase in the incident angle and the contrast loss caused by the polarization angle error also grew rapidly. By changing the mode to azimuthal (TE-TE-TE) polarization, the contrast of the interference pattern can be ensured to remain above 0.97 even though the incident angle is large. In addition, TE-TE-TE mode can accept larger polarization angle errors. This conclusion provides a theoretical basis for the generation of high-contrast light fields at different incident angles, and the conclusion is also applicable to multi-beam interference lithography.

The movable super-diffraction optical needle (MSON) is a tightly focused beam like a “needle”, which can realize vector scanning on the focusing plane. Not only does it have a long focal depth, but its resolution also exceeds the diffraction limit. The modulation and control technology required for generating MSON by oblique incidence is explored in this manuscript for the purpose of processing high-aspect-ratio, sub-wavelength structures. As the optical needle generated by traditional methods is static and sensitive to variation of the angle information of the incident beam, here we introduce a confocal scanning system by using a two-dimensional galvanometer system, a scan lens, and a tube lens to control the oblique incidence angle. The effects of the oblique incidence angle on the resolution, depth of focus, uniformity, and side lobes of the MSON were analyzed. Further, the voltage-controlled liquid crystal located between the scan lens and the 2D galvanometer system can be used to compensate for the additional phase difference caused by oblique incidence. The aspect ratio is defined as the ratio of depth of focus to resolution. By modulating and controlling the light field, the MSON with high aspect ratio (7.36), sub-diffractive beam size (0.42λ), and long depth of focus (3.09λ) has been obtained with homogeneous intensity, and suppressed side lobes. High speed, high axial positioning tolerance, and high-resolution laser processing can also be achieved, which removes the restrictions presented by traditional laser processing technology, for which high resolution and long depth of focus cannot be achieved simultaneously.

The phase retrieval method based on random phase modulation can wipe out any ambiguity and stagnation problem in reconstruction. However, the two existing reconstruction algorithms for the random phase modulation method are suffering from problems. The serial algorithm from the spread-spectrum phase retrieval method can realize rapid convergence but has poor noise immunity. Although there is a parallel framework that can suppress noise, the convergence speed is slow. Here, we propose a random phase modulation phase retrieval method based on a serial−parallel cascaded reconstruction framework to simultaneously achieve quality imaging and rapid convergence. The proposed serial−parallel cascaded method uses the phased result from the serial algorithm to serve as the initialization of the subsequent parallel process. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the superiorities of both serial and parallel algorithms are fetched by the proposed serial−parallel cascaded method. In the end, we analyze the effect of iteration numbers from the serial process on the reconstruction performance to find the optimal allocation scope of iteration numbers.