Our aspheric lenses are made from Schott B 270® Ultra-White Glass which has numerous advantages for condenser lenses. For example, it is highly transparent across a wide range of wavelengths, and is highly resistant to intense UV exposure, making it ideal for use with light sources such as high intensity arc lamps.

In applications that require large acceptance angles, such as light gathering for illumination, spherical lenses are unsuitable due to spherical aberration, or the effect of refractive power of a spherical surface becoming greater with increasing aperture. Aspheric lenses maintain constant focal length or very high NA, avoiding the need for multiple elements to correct spherical aberration. This simplifies system design by reducing weight and component count. It also results in less transmission loss, and less ghosting due to having fewer surfaces. The primary drawback of an aspheric lens is off-axis performance is poor. This is not a problem for coupling to and from optical fibers or collimating light sources, but aspheric lenses are not usable over a wide field of view.

Our Aspheric Condenser Lenses provide higher numerical apertures (NA), larger apertures and lower f# ratios, when compared to standard spherical lenses. They are ideally suited for illumination applications, such as light collection and condensing, projection and detection. Examples include coupling light into and out of optical fibers, efficiently collecting output from optical sources, or focusing beams onto small high-speed detectors.