Designing double freeform surfaces for collimated beam shaping with optimal mass transportation and linear assignment problems

Abstract: We propose a method for designing refractive optical elements for collimated beam shaping. In this method, the problem of finding a ray mapping is formulated as a linear assignment problem, which is a discrete version of the corresponding mass transportation problem. A method for reconstructing optical surfaces from a computed discrete ray mapping is proposed. The method is suitable for designing continuous piecewise-smooth optical surfaces. The design of refractive optical elements transforming beams with circular cross-section to variously shaped (rectangular, triangular, and cross-shaped) beams with plane wavefront is discussed. The presented numerical simulation results confirm high efficiency of the designed optical elements.