The Beynon Gabor zone plate: a new tool for de Broglie matter waves and hard X-rays? An off axis and focus intensity investigation

Optical elements based on Fresnel zones are used in a range of applications, from X-ray telescopy to microscopy and recently also in the manipulation of de Broglie matter waves. In 1992 Beynon and co-workers presented a binary Gabor type zone plate (henceforth referred to as the Beynon Gabor zone plate). Because this zone plate has no higher order foci, it is in principle a very attractive candidate for focusing of de Broglie matter waves and in some cases X-rays. So far the Beynon Gabor zone plate investigations presented in the literature have concentrated on the intensity distribution along the optical axis and in the focal plane. Here we present a detailed numerical investigation of the Beynon Gabor zone plate, including an investigation of the off-optical axis, off focal plane intensity distribution for point source illumination. We show that at integer fractions of the focal length, the beam becomes nearly toroidal (doughnut-shaped). This offers potentially interesting new possibilities for de Broglie matter wave and X-ray optics, for example in STED-like applications. We further show that the increased intensity at the focal point predicted in the literature for a particular Beynon Gabor zone plate transmission function configuration is an artifact due to the lack of sampling nodes. We support our calculations with experimental measurements in the visible light range, using a Beynon Gabor zone plate fabricated with electron beam lithography.