Geometric and Wave Optic Features in the Optical Transmission Patterns of Injection-molded Mesoscale Pyramid Prism Patterned Plates

Abstract

In this paper, mesoscale optical surface structures are found to possess both geometric and wave optics features. The study reveals that geometric optic analysis cannot correctly predict the experimental results of light transmission or reflection by mesoscale optical structures, and that, for reliable analyses, a hybrid approach incorporating both geometric and wave optic theories should be employed. By analyzing the transmission patterns generated by the mesoscale periodic pyramid prism plates, we show that the wave optic feature is mainly ascribed to the edge diffraction effect and we estimate the relative contributions of the wave optic diffraction effect and the geometric refraction effect to the total scattering field distribution with respect to the relative dimension of the structures.