Designing Fresnel zone plates using formulas in BEAMER

Motivation:

Manual design of layouts is valuable for designs with few elements and for special shapes, as irregular polygons; however, for regular shapes that need to cover large areas, the manual procedure is tiresome and prone to mistakes. The use of equations increases the precision of a pattern and speeds up the design process. Additionally, only a mathematical description translates into a specific optical performance of an optical element.

Solution:

BEAMER supports the use of equations within its modules. Particularly, BEAMER flexibility can be used to design from scratch a full layout pattern, for instance, a Fresnel Zone Plate. A combination of Loop module containing a Transform module, and finally a Boolean operation (P-XOR module) results in a design which can be easily tunned for different wavelengths and focal lengths.