Obstructive micro diffracting structures as an alternative to plasmonics nano slits for making efficient microlenses.

Miniature optical components at the wavelength scale remain today a theoretically opened challenging problem of great technological interest. Appart from refractive micro-optics, plasmonics have been proposed to realize micro lenses with properly designed planar metallic nano-patterns. We show in this paper that efficient light focusing at the diffraction limit with higher transmission can be obtained with micro-structures much easier to fabricate than nano ones, such as a simple micro-slit studied here as an example. Optical properties are attributed to diffraction and a quantitative excellent agreement between experiment and theory is obtained.