Elliptic zone plate – investigation of imaging properties

Elliptic zone plate (EZP) is an diffractive element with elliptically shaped zone borders. Such zone plate characterizes different focusing abilities in meridian and sagittal plane, leading to astigmatism. These properties enable to use it as an aberration corrector in more complicated optical systems. Also chromatic aberration can be reduced in such an optical system. The diffractive structure of EZP may be placed on the flat or curved surface. There were made examinations how shape of background surface influences imaging characteristic. The potential application of EZP is to correct astigmatism of human eye. Imaging properties of this structure were numerically examined.