Nonparaxial anamorphic diffractive lenses

Applications of anamorphic diffractive lenses, or in other words elliptical zone plates, are growing in number and diversity. Following this progress, the manufacturing methods of anamorphic diffractive lenses are also a subject of continuous improvement. On the other hand, their design is still based mainly on the paraxial approximation. In the present paper nonparaxial elliptical zone plates are presented and their difference from the paraxial version, termed as the elliptical aberration is shown. A comparison of their focusing quality was performed based on results of numerical modelling as well as experiments. (paper)