Acylindrical Lens

Acylindrical lenses are the cylindrical counterpart to an aspheric lens and designed to combine the aberration-reducing benefits of an aspheric surface with the one-dimensional focusing of a standard cylindrical lens.

Positive cylindrical lenses are ideal for uses requiring magnification in one dimension. While spherical lenses work symmetrically in two dimensions on an incident ray, cylindrical lenses act in the same manner but only in one dimension. A typical application is to use a pair of cylindrical lenses to provide anamorphic shaping of a beam. A pair of positive cylindrical lenses can be used to collimate and circularize the output of a laser diode. Another application would be to use a single lens to focus a diverging beam onto a detector array.

Photonchina’s cylindrical lenses are slightly deviated from a true cylinder in a way that minimizes the introduction of aberrations, which result in a wavefront error of 500nm.Our lenses are fabricated using S-LAH64 optical glass, that is a low dispersion glass with high index of refraction in order to limit chromatic aberration.