Our broadband AR.16 antireflection coating improves the transmission efficiency of these lenses by reducing surface reflections over a 650-1000 nm wavelength range. The NIR AR multi-layer coating improves the performance over uncoated surfaces. It features a damage threshold of 7.5 J/cm‌² for 10 ns pulses at 10 Hz and 1064 nm.

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.