Abstract
Generally, uniformity can be improved at the cost of a low diffraction efficiency in the design of diffractive optical elements by the conventional iterative Fourier transform algorithm. This trade-off is a fundamental limitation of the conventional iterative Fourier transform algorithm. However in this letter, a novel iterative Fourier transform algorithm with adaptive regularization parameter distribution for alleviating the trade-off between uniformity and diffraction efficiency and for improving uniformity is devised on the basis of the theoretical analysis of the trade-off property in the conventional iterative Fourier transform algorithm scheme. The validity of the proposed algorithm is proved by numerical experiments.