Near-net shaping of silicon for optical lens by one-shot pressing at temperature just below silicon melting point and improvement of infrared transmittance by primary recrystallization

Silicon is brittle and easily cracks even under a small load. The difficulty in shaping silicon has prevented breakthroughs in the mass production of silicon lenses for terahertz and infrared technology. We developed a novel method of deforming bulk single-crystal silicon into the required shape by one-shot pressing at a temperature just below the melting point of silicon, despite its brittleness and covalent nature, and realized the near-net shaping of the material into the plano-convex shape with the curvature radius R=7.5 mm for a infrared transmission lens. The crystallographic quality of the obtained lens could be improved by primary recrystallization. The simple method of 'pressing' will enable the mass production of not only silicon lenses but also lenses with a complex shape, such as aspherical lenses, and lens arrays by using dies with desired shape.