Advanced fabrication techniques for extremely large microoptics and complex optical fields (Invited Paper)

3D printed micro-optics has revolutionized medical imaging as well as sensor and AR/VR applications in the last decade. Two-photon polymerization lead to the fabrication of singlet and multiplet optical elements which included aspherical and non-rotational free-form elements, as well as a combination of diffractive and refractive elements. Multiple materials with different dispersion properties allowed for achromatic performance, and 3d printed black polymers enabled aperture stops as well as absorptive hulls. Diffraction limited performance over a large field of view with complete suppression of 1st and 3rd order abberations as well as apochromatic properties for three different colors were made possible by two-photon direct laser written micro-optics, leading to wavefront aberrations as small as lambda/100. In this contribution, we expand the performance parameters to very large optics in the range of up to 5mm as well as to more complex light fields, such as multiple foci. 3D printed elements take therefore a large step towards applications such as high-performance microscopy, trapping of multiple particles or atoms, in a variety of complex fields, on the tip of a single fiber.