Introduction to cylinder lenses

Cylinder lenses are crucial to the progression of technology for applications ranging from medical diagnostic devices to laser diode correction mechanisms. They are similar to spherical lenses in the sense that they use curved surfaces to converge or diverge light, but cylinder lenses have optical power in only one dimension and will not affect light in the perpendicular dimension.

This is impossible to accomplish using spherical lenses as light will focus or diverge uniformly in a rotationally symmetric manner. Cylinder lenses have many uses including forming laser light sheets and circularizing elliptical beams.