Fabricated using B270 glass, and available with a single-layer MgF2 coating, these lenses provide excellent transmission in the visible to near-infrared regions.
The aspheric surface is precision molded, while the plano or spherical surface is ground and polished. Ideal for light collection, projection, illumination, detection, and condensing applications.
In applications that require large acceptance angles, such as light gathering for illumination, spherical lenses are unsuitable due to spherical aberration, or the effect of refractive power of a spherical surface becoming greater with increasing aperture. Aspheric lenses maintain constant focal length or very high NA, avoiding the need for multiple elements to correct spherical aberration. This simplifies system design by reducing weight and component count. It also results in less transmission loss, and less ghosting due to having fewer surfaces. The primary drawback of aspheric lenses is off-axis performance is poor. This is not a problem for coupling to and from optical fibers or collimating light sources, but aspheric lenses are not usable over a wide field of view.
Our aspheric condenser lenses have diffraction limited performance on axis, and are available in a range of high numerical apertures. They are ideal for applications such as coupling light into and out of optical fibers, efficiently collecting output from optical sources, or focusing beams onto small high speed detectors.
Our aspheric lenses are made from Schott B 270® Ultra-White Glass Schott B 270® glass has numerous advantages for condenser lenses. It is highly transparent across a wide range of wavelengths, and is highly resistant to intense UV exposure, making it ideal for use with light sources such as high intensity arc lamps.
Only single-layer MgF2 coatings are available on these lenses since the steep aspheric curvatures present a performance problem near the edges for multilayer coatings. Our single layer Magnesium Fluoride AR coating is a common choice that offers an extremely broad visible wavelength range at a reasonable price. Compared to the uncoated surface, the MgF2 coating provides a significant improvement by reducing the reflectance to less than 1.5%. It works extremely well from 400-700 nm and at angles of incidence less than 15 degrees.