Method for manufacturing optical computation device, optical diffraction unit intermediate, and optical computation device

1 . A method for manufacturing an optical computing device using a container that includes n side walls WS 1 to WS n and n bottom walls WB 1 to WB n made of an optically-transparent material, where n is a natural number of not less than 2, the method comprising the steps of:

forming the container including an i-th cavity C i and a flow passage through which the i-th cavity C i communicates with an outside of the container, using at least an i-th bottom wall WB i and an i-th side wall WS i , where i is an integer of 1≤i≤n;

filling the i-th cavity C i with a liquid material R i containing a photo-curable resin and sealing the flow passage using a lid;

forming n light diffraction elements of the optical computing device on one main surface of the bottom wall WB i through stereolithography by emitting light to a part near an interface between the bottom wall WB i and the liquid material R i to cure the photo-curable resin, and

removing the lid and removing the liquid R i from the i-th cavity C through the flow passage.

2 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein:

the forming of the container, the filling the cavity C i , and the forming of the light diffraction elements are carried out repeatedly for each cavity C i .

3 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein:

the container further includes a bottom wall WB n+1 , which is an n+1-th bottom wall;

in the forming of the container, the i-th bottom walls WB i , i+1-th bottom walls WB i+1 , and the i-th side walls WS i are used to form the container, and the cavities C i are layered;

in the filling the cavity C i , the cavities C i are filled with the liquid material R i containing the photo-curable resin; and

in the forming of the light diffraction elements, the emitting of the light is carried out for each of the cavities C i .

4 . The method as set forth in claim 2 , wherein:

in the forming of the light diffraction elements, the light is emitted to the part near the interface by a two-photon method.

5 . The method as set forth in claim 2 , wherein:

a second light is emitted to inhibit curing of the photo-curable resin; and

in the forming of the light diffraction elements, the second light is emitted at least to a cavity adjacent to each of the cavities C i .

6 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein:

each of the light diffraction elements includes a plurality of cells having respective thicknesses or refractive indices set independently of each other.

7 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , further comprising the step of:

forming a light conversion layer at a stage subsequent to a last bottom wall, the light conversion layer being configured to convert infrared light into visible light.

8 . The method as set forth in claim 7 , further comprising the step of:

forming a diffusion layer at the stage subsequent to the last bottom wall, the diffusion layer being configured to diffuse the infrared light or the visible light.

9 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein:

the side wall WS i is constituted by four blocks each having a rectangular parallelepiped shape; and

the flow passage is formed by arranging the four blocks of the side wall WS i such that the four blocks are spaced from each other.

10 . The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein:

the flow passage is a groove provided to the side wall WS i .