Designing and fabricating diffractive optical elements with a complex profile by interference

We demonstrate a novel (to our knowledge) method for the design and the fabrication of diffractive optical elements (DOEs) with an arbitrary complex phase profile based on interference. The DOEs are designed to modulate the complex light wave by the analytical formulas, and an asymmetric holographic DOE with cubic phase modulation is fabricated by a two-step exposure technique. The desired Airy beams are produced experimentally, which demonstrates the validity of this method. It is a simple approach with a low cost for the design and the fabrication of DOEs with a large area and arbitrary phase distribution.