Achromatic Cascade Optical System with Hybrid Lenses for Distortion-compensated Multifocusing of Ultrashort Pulse Beams

We report an achromatic cascade optical system for multifocusing ultrashort pulse beams in its application in high-precision materials processing. The challenge is to eliminate the beam-radius-dependent pulse broadening or pulse front distortion from the arrayed pulses. We propose the inclusion of a pair of hybrid refractive-diffractive lenses for chromatic aberration correction and dispersion management in the system. From numerical analysis, we have realized that the hybridized system has enormous potential to improve not only the spatial resolution but also the temporal resolution to their respective limits in generating arrayed pulse beams. This pulse delivery system enables high-throughput material processing using ultrashort-pulsed lasers.