Polyadic devil's lenses.

Devil's lenses (DLs) were recently proposed as a new kind of kinoform lens in which the phase structure is characterized by the "devil's staircase" function. DLs are considered fractal lenses because they are constructed following the geometry of the triadic Cantor set and because they provide self-similar foci along the optical axis. Here, DLs are generalized allowing the inclusion of polyadic Cantor distributions in their design. The lacunarity of the selected polyadic fractal distribution is an additional design parameter. The results are coined polyadic DLs. Construction requirements and interrelations among the different parameters of these new fractal lenses are also presented. It is shown that the lacunarity parameter affects drastically the irradiance profile along the optical axis, appodizing higher-order foci, and these features are proved to improve the behavior of conventional DLs under polychromatic illumination.