Fabrication of binary Fresnel lenses in PMMA by femtosecond laser surface ablation

We report on the fabrication of binary Fresnel lenses by femtosecond laser surface ablation of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) substrates. Tight focusing of the laser pulses produced a minimum ablated feature size of 600 nm, enabling the creation of lenses with numerical apertures as high as 0.5 and focal lengths ranging from 500 mu m to 5 mm. A precise control of the ablation depth allowed the achievement of a 30% focusing efficiency, close to the maximum theoretical value for this kind of lenses. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America