Output Range (330 nm - 960 nm) Depending on the LED's selected for useShutteringTurn ON/OFF time: <25 µsNoise/Short term stability0.01%LED Life >50,000 hoursControl Box Dimensions7 in x 19 in x 10.5 in | 17.7 cm x 48.25 cm x 26.5 cmWeight23 lbs | 10.43 kgElectrical120/240 Volts50/60 Hertz power line

If you’re hoping for more degrees of freedom for optical correction, there is another doublet called the separated doublet.

$$ \phi = \phi_1 + \phi_2\ \\ \phi = (n-1) (1/R_1 + 1/R_2) = 1/f\ \\ C_1 = 1/R_1, C_2 = 1/R_2\ \\ Total C = C_1 + C_2 $$

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Achromatic doubletmeaning

The separated doublet separates the cemented element for an extra surface for correction, which gives us an extra degree of freedom, because the cemented surface of the cemented doublet has to have the same shape. This one extra surface improves the system a lot since we didn’t have many parameters for correction, to begin with.

Includes Lambda 721 with liquid light guide, cables, and power cord. The instrument accepts up to 7 LED cubes (listed below) and can easily be reconfigured. The LED cube consist of the LED, collimating optics and the appropriate Semrock®-STR excitation filter for the output of the LED.

This may seem like oversimplifying, but this is all we need from the specifications. Even for more complex systems, the goal of lens design is not to make all the aberrations zero, because this is usually not possible. We need to keep certain aberrations at designated values, non-zero, so the overall performance is good.

Achromaticaberration

Traditionally, combining more than two light sources required the use of a dichroic ladder. Dichroic mirrors, which switch from transmission to reflection at one point in the spectrum, allow the combining of separate light sources, provided that those sources do not have overlapping wavelengths. The downside of this approach is that light sources cannot be easily changed. Dichroic ladders also demand careful attention to the order in which the light sources are introduced into the optical path to avoid having the light blocked by the next dichroic in line. Typically, additional bandpass filters must be added in front of each light source before the dichroic, to select the desired range of wavelengths for each source. Each filter and dichroic used in the ladder decreases the total light output of the system.

Choosing the glass types for the cemented doublet is not trivial. People mulled for decades to derive an equation, or a theorem that could be used for glass selection. In reality, it is plug and play, trial and error. (This is the very reason why lens design itself is as difficult as it is. However, a good lens design depends on proper knowledge of the theory. Some parts of the theory are not complete. The irony!)

Choosing the glass types so that the red, green and blue lines line up at the focal point, and we have corrected for colour (The images are exaggerated, but still). This is done by cancelling the chromatic aberration caused by the positive lens by generating an opposite chromatic aberration with the second lens.

What is anachromaticlens used for

The doublet is a relatively simple lens to design, but there is a lot that goes into it that can be applied to many optical systems in lens design. Colour correction is the main step in any modern lens design, so get a handle on chromatic aberrations and you’ll be miles ahead in real-world lens design.

Chromatic aberration is corrected by choosing glass. The thin lens equations are used to calculate how much chromatic aberration there is in a doublet, and balance them.

Achromatic doubletlenses

For an in-depth and thorough calculation of the achromatic doublet using Excel or similar spreadsheet software, I have an Ultimate Guide to lens design with a spreadsheet that walks through each of the steps and calculations.

Colour fills the world. When we image those colours with lenses, we want it to represent what we see. Even in the days of black-and-white photos, the scene is is colour, right?

This FREE ebook (and newsletter) will help you uncover the tactics of lens design. It will show you the concepts and strategies of lens design through spreadsheets so that you can take control of your lens design.

For these systems, the focal length is usually extremely long compared to the lens’ physical thickness, making it close to a thin lens (in practice). That is to say, that in terms of calculations, the thickness is so small relative to the entire focal length of the lens so that any calculations that are affected by the thickness are so small that we can ignore them. The larger effects are the radius of curvature, and the curvature can be simplified and modified into the optical power (the reciprocal of focal length), which is the thin lens equation. Thus, the doublet can be designed as a thin lens for many applications. We still have three degrees of freedom for lens design.

The chromatic aberration is calculated with the above thin lens equations, which is what we need for an achromatic doublet. The shapes of two lenses need to total the targeted focal length. Just a reminder, the thin lens system is for lenses that have a long focal length relative to the thickness of each of the lenses.

Since the system can be approximated as a thin lens, we don’t have to worry about extra calculations just yet. But the parameters we have at our disposal provide sufficient information to understand how aberrations work. This is especially true for the doublet.

The Lambda 721 is a new concept for combining up to 7 separate LED cubes with different spectra into a single common output beam. The LED cubes contain the LED, collimating optics, and a filter. These LED cubes are easily exchanged and installed with no tools required. Each LED cube is collimated before entering the optical path through the bandpass filter. The filters for each LED cube also function as mirrors that reflect the collimated beams from the previous light sources. In the diagram below the optical paths are outlined for each position including the reflections that occur:

We can solve for f = 100mm and Chromatic = 0 and get \(\phi_1\) and \(\phi_2\), as we have two variables and two unknowns.

Achromaticlens for telescope

You can see in Step 2 that the R3, the curvature of the last surface (R3=-118.4559mm, in red) is solved to minimize the longitudinal chromatic aberration. If you use Excel or a similar spreadsheet program like I did, it is easy to find the solution so that the focal length is 100mm and chromatic part to be zero. Of course, you can play around with the other radii like R1 and R2.

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With the above equation, we can calculate the focal length of a lens with the radius of curvature. the total curvature Total C is a useful measure to have while looking at the power of the lens.

Bad things can come with good things, and for the separated doublet this extra degree of freedom can cause problems for manufacturing tolerances and assembly, since separated lenses are harder to align than cemented lenses.

Edmund Opticsachromatic doublet

Above is the thin lens calculation result for an achromatic doublet. The two curvatures C1 and C2, and the total curvature TC are calculated. Curvature C is 1/R, the radius of curvature. The specification for this example is f = 100mm, Chromatic = 0. I’ve also chosen some values for the radii R1, R2 , all given above, and the glass are FK5 and F1.

Without colour correction, we can get blurry photographs since each of the wavelengths in the colour spectrum will image to a different place. We can also get the problem of splitting colours where we can see fringes of blue or red on the edges of the image.

For more extensive analysis the doublet, and other lens designs, I have written a massive post on lens design with a spreadsheet on my website. I start with the underlying theory, but I quickly move on to practical examples that include simple lens design of a singlet lens, doublet lens, and a triplet lens, all which doesn’t require expensive proprietary software to do.

The Lambda 721 was designed to keep the size of the beam combiner small and the optical path short and efficient. Thin-film bandpass filters, such as Semrock’s STR, reflect greater than 90% of out-of-band light. If the band pass of each light source does not overlap, it is possible to use the filters for both attenuation and reflection of the light from the other sources. By arranging the filters and sources into a double pentagon, we were able to combine seven light sources in a compact design with lower losses than previously achievable. As an added benefit, the last position in the optical train does not require any filter since no other input reflects from that position. This position can be used with LED’s that have broad spectral output, such as the 561nm LED, and may allow the excitation of more than single channel of fluorescence from a single LED. (raw spectra available upon request)

Achromatic DoubletThorlabs

Step 3 and on are paraxial raytracing and evaluation of the Seidel aberrations. These all require the thickness of the lens, so we’ll stop here.

With a good choice of glass, even though the positive lens will spit the colour, the stronger dispersion of the negative lens will spread the colour strongly in the opposite direction compared to the positive lens, and line up the red, green, and blue lines.

Typical glass has a higher refractive index at shorter wavelengths. This causes chromatic aberration, since the focal length will be different for different wavelengths.

Look at the table above, and the value in the “chromatic” column is close to zero at -0.00015 (in blue font). We also see that the focal length is not correct, at 212.0101mm (also in blue font). This is corrected in the next step.

The achromatic doublet corrects chromatic aberrations, but the corrections can be calculated with thin lenses. Colour-corrective achromatic doublets for objectives, most notably the objective lens for a telescope are most common and easiest to explain. The objective form is also used elsewhere, even if it is not a telescope. Such as collimator lenses, which we usually design backward from actual use, which makes it identical to a telescope objective!

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Achromatic doubletformula

For other applications, like laser applications, it is absolutely crucial to achieving performance with multiple wavelengths for some systems.

The Abbe number \(\nu\) is a measure for the dispersion of the material. Dispersion, conceptually is a measure of how much the rays change with a given wavelength. Thus, the Abbe number is defined by the following equation.

where \(\phi\) = lens power, and R = radius. Here, \(\phi_1\) is the positive lens, and \(\phi_2\) is the negative lens.

This post is about the achromatic doublet, but the concepts can be applied to a lot of lens systems. Don’t forget your preliminary lens design and analysis!

The LB-721 includes Lambda 721 with liquid light guide, cables, and power cord. The instrument accepts up to 7 LED cubes (listed below) and can easily be reconfigured. The LED cube consist of the LED, collimating optics and the appropriate Semrock®-STR excitation filter for the output of the LED.

Dichroic ladders also demand careful attention to the order in which the light sources are introduced into the optical path to avoid having the light blocked by the next dichroic in line. Typically, additional bandpass filters must be added in front of each light source before the dichroic, to select the desired range of wavelengths for each source. Each filter and dichroic used in the ladder decreases the total light output of the system.