Regular papers

Modelling adapted to manufacturing aspects of holographic grating structures

¹ Technology Microstructured Optics, Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH, Carl-Zeiss-Promenade 10, 07740 Jena, Germany
² Institute of Applied Physics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universit¨at, Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, 07745 Jena, Germany
³ Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films, Bienroder Weg 54 E, 38108 Braunschweig, Germany
⁴ University of Applied Sciences Jena, Carl Zeiss Promenade 2, 07745 Jena, Germany

^* sandfuchs@zeiss.de

Received: 10 August 2010

Abstract

The diffraction efficiencies of modified sinusoidal and blazed gratings are investigated in the high spatial frequency regime by rigorous numerical methods and are compared to experimentally manufactured gratings. The introduced modifications take actual technological induced variations of the profile geometries, such as specific corner rounding, into account. The high spatial frequency regime (resonance regime) is characterized by a local grating period, g, to wavelength, λ, ratio of 0.7 ≤ g/λ ≤ 4 and shows an important relevance for applications in spectroscopy and diffractive imaging. The investigations are carried out for both reflection on metallic surfaces and transmission of dielectric structures over a broad range of grating periods and incidence angles. It was found that near the grating resonance, the more simply producible sine gratings can compete in diffraction efficiency with sawtooth structures. Additionally, for certain application conditions, holographically modified sine structures achieve higher efficiencies than the ideal sine profile. It is also shown that holographic sinusoidal-like profiles measured by AFM can be fitted to a super-Gaussian shape, which is then used to inversely reconstruct the structure profiles from efficiency data.