Unlocking the transformative power of freeform optics: an analytical approach to design for imaging applications

Freeform optics, an emerging technology, holds immense transformative potential in imaging applications. This groundbreaking technology has permeated numerous fields, providing extremely compact design for applications including AR/VR, quantum cryptography, lighting, remote sensing, medical devices, and energy research, showcasing its versatility and growing importance. Manufacturing methods have been developed such as diamond turning, additive manufacturing, or two-photon polymerization. Compared to conventional optics, a critical difficulty that limits the wide adoption of the technology, is the difficulty to generate a good initial freeform surface that can later be optimized to meet the designer requirements. Here we present a novel design method, which takes a set of analytical constraints as input and generates freeform surfaces that precisely meet these constraints as output. We address the case of a head-up display.