Cylinder Lenses

COE Optics' cylindrical lenses are the ones that focus light which passes through on to a line instead of on to a point, as a spherical lens would. The curved face or faces of a cylindrical lens are sections of a cylinder, and focus the image passing through it onto a line parallel to the intersection of the surface of the lens and a plane tangent to it. The lens compresses the image in the direction perpendicular to this line and leaves it unaltered in the direction parallel to it (in the tangent plane).

COE Optics can supply Plano concave cylindrical lens or plano-convex cylindrical lens, which is working to expand or focus light, respectively.  Give COE Optics your ideas or choose from N-BK7 glass, UV fused silica, or CaF2, all of which are available uncoated or with an antireflection coating.

Plano-convex cylindrical lenses are positive cylindrical lenses that are ideal for applications requiring magnification in one dimension. While spherical lenses act symmetrically in two dimensions on an incident ray, cylindrical lenses act in the same manner but only in one dimension. A typical application is to use a pair of cylindrical lenses to provide anamorphic shaping of a beam. A pair of positive cylindrical lenses can be used to collimate and circularize the output of a laser diode. Another application possibility would be to use a single lens to focus a diverging beam onto a detector array. To minimize the introduction of spherical aberrations, collimated light should be incident on the curved surface when focusing it to a line, and light from a line source should be incident on the Plano surface when collimating.

Plano-concave cylindrical lenses are negative Plano concave spherical lenses, except on only one axis. These lenses are used in applications that require one-dimensional shaping of a light source. A typical application is to use a single cylindrical lens to turn a collimated laser into a line generator. Pairs of cylindrical lenses may be used to amorphically shape images. To minimize the introduction of aberration, the curved surface of the lens should face the source when used to diverge a beam.