Acylindrical Lenses

General Specifications
Design Wavelength	780 nm
AR Coating Range	350 - 700 nm (-A Coating) 650 - 1050 nm (-B Coating)
Wavefront Error (RMS)	<0.5 µm
Surface Quality	60-40 Scratch-Dig
Lens Material	S-LAH64
Index of Refraction at 780 nm	1.777
Abbe Number	47.3

Precision Aspheric Lenses Selection Guide
Substrate Material	NA	Mount
UV Fused Silica	0.142 - 0.145	Unmounted
	0.142 - 0.145	Mounted
	0.65	Unmounted
N-BK7 / S-LAH64	0.23 - 0.61	Unmounted
	0.23 - 0.55	Mounted
Zinc Selenide	0.22 - 0.67	Unmounted
Acylindrical Lenses	0.45 - 0.54	Unmounted
Axicons	-	Unmounted

Zemax Files
Click on the red Document icon next to the item numbers below to access the Zemax file download. Our entire Zemax Catalog is also available.

Features

• Cylindrical Lenses Featuring an Aberration-Reducing Acylindrical Surface
• Numerical Apertures Ranging from 0.45 to 0.54
• Available with Either a 350 - 700 nm or 650 - 1050 nm AR Coating

These acylindrical lenses are the cylindrical counterpart to an aspheric lens; they are designed to combine the aberration-reducing benefits of an aspheric surface with the one-dimensional focusing of a standard cylindrical lens. The lenses sold on this page are manufactured using a computer numerical controlled (CNC) grinding and polishing process.

Positive cylindrical lenses are ideal for applications requiring magnification in one dimension. While spherical lenses act 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 possibility would be to use a single lens to focus a diverging beam onto a detector array.

These cylindrical lenses are slightly deviated from a true cylinder in a way that minimizes the introduction of aberrations, which yields a wavefront error of 500 nm (RMS). The lenses are manufactured using S-LAH64 optical glass, which is a low-dispersion glass with high index of refraction in order to minimize chromatic aberration.

Please see the Selection Guide table to the right for our full selection of precision aspheric lenses.

Mounting Options
These lenses may be mounted in one of our cylindrical lens mounts. For a specific mount recommendation for each lens, please see the Mounting Options tab.

Click to Enlarge
Reference Drawing

Acylindircal Lens Design Formula

The acylindric surface of these lenses may be described using a polynomial expansion in Y, the radial distance from the optical axis. The surface profile or sagitta (often abbreviated as sag) is denoted by z, and is given by the following expression:

where R is the radius of curvature, k is the conic constant, and the A_n are the nth order acylindric coefficients. The sign of R is determined by whether the center of curvature for the lens surface is located to the right or left of the lens' vertex; a positive R indicates that the center of curvature is located to the right of the vertex, while a negative R indicates that the center of curvature is located to the left of the vertex. For example, the radius of curvature for the left surface of a biconvex lens would be specified as positive, while the radius of curvature for its right surface would be specified as negative.

Acylindric Lens Coefficients

Due to the mirror symmetry of the lens surface, only even powers of Y are contained in the polynomial expansion above. The target values of the acylindric coefficients for each product can be found in the table below or by clicking on the red documents icon () next to each lens sold below.

Thorlabs offers kinematic, fixed, and cage-compatible cylindrical lens mounts. The table below lists a recommended fixed and kinematic mount for our acylindrical lenses.