At Thorlabs, we constantly reinforce our desire to serve at the pleasure of our customers. From this comes our desire to be connected to our industry in a way that far exceeds what would typically be expected of a vendor. Thorlabs lives this core principle by seeking to enhance, at every turn, the productivity of our customers. We have developed a culture that constantly seeks your input; many of you have experienced this first hand, as a large portion of our product offerings are customer inspired. Others may note that a website feature exists because you let us know that it would make you more productive.
A direct outcome of this customer focus is our utmost respect for your time. This drives us to question everything we do. It informs our product design, shapes our approach to manufacturing, and provides clarity for our customer service department. We constantly ask ourselves how we can make the entire process of finding, understanding, purchasing, and using a product more efficient. By saving you time, we enhance your productivity, which allows us all to foster the continued forward movement of photonics.</p> Thorlabs' extensive line of lenses includes spherical, achromatic, aspheric, and cylindrical lenses, both with and without antireflection coatings deposited on the surfaces. Choose from various substrates, including N-BK7, UV fused silica, calcium fluoride, magnesium fluoride, zinc selenide, germanium, and silicon. In addition, Thorlabs also offers Axicons and Air-Spaced Doublets.
Thorlabs' family of graded-index (GRIN) lenses has been specially designed to be paired with our bare or connectorized pigtailed ferrules. In contrast to our pigtailed aspheric lenses and jacketed GRIN collimators, this product family allows the combination of GRIN lens and optionally connectorized pigtailed ferrule to be individually chosen, satisfying a wide range of experimental requirements. See the image to the right for an example of an assembled device, or use the Selection Guide below to choose compatible lens and pigtailed ferrule combinations for your specific application.
GRIN lenses are generally used to collimate or reimage the output of a fiber. Typical applications include coupling the output of diode lasers into fibers, focusing laser light onto a detector, or collimating laser light. The lenses listed here are designed for a central wavelength of 630, 830, 1060, 1300, or 1560 nm, and are available with either an 8° or 0° face angle. The 8° versions maximize the return loss by back reflecting the incident light at a non-normal angle and are recommended for building collimators. In contrast, the 0° versions are easier to align but are only recommended for general fiber-to-fiber coupling. The 1300 and 1560 nm lenses additionally feature an AR coating that reduces reflections at the interfaces to below 0.2% at the specified wavelengths, minimizing back reflections and insertion losses. Our line of pigtailed ferrules provides an 8° or 0° face angle that is designed to match the GRIN lenses.
GRIN lenses do not require an air gap to function since the operation of the lens is due to varying indices in the lens itself, rather than the difference in indices between the air and lens. Additionally, in a GRIN lens, all optical paths (refractive index multiplied by distance) are the same due to the radially varying refractive index, in contrast to a spherical or aspheric lens. For information on how to calculate the refractive index as a function of radius, please see the Specs tab.
| Thorlabs, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Product Category | Optical Lenses |
| Product Name | GRIN Lenses |
| Lens Type | Gradient Index Lens |
| Focal Length | 1.85 to 1.99 mm (0.0728 to 0.0783 inch) |
| Center Thickness | 4.26 to 5.59 mm (0.1677 to 0.2201 inch) |
