Diamond focusators for far IR lasers

Recently a new technique has been proposed for laser-assisted generation of phase microrelief to manufacture diamond diffractive lenses for the far IR range. In the present paper the realization of diamond diffractive optical elements (DOEs) is considered, able to focus an incoming CO2 laser beam into certain pre-given focal domains. Exemplarily, two completely different DOEs for different tasks of laser beam focusing have been designed by different methods, manufactured and finally investigated by means of optical experiment and computer simulation. Measured intensity distributions in the DOEs' focal planes as well as measured diffraction efficiencies have been compared with related results of computer simulation, and have been found to be in good mutual concordance. Obtained first results indicate that technique of laser-assisted ablation can be effectively used for manufacturing of high quality diamond DOEs for laser beam focusing.