Patent ID: 8568627

Claim:
A method for modifying at least one optical property of a lens in situ in a human eye, the lens comprising a body formed of an optical material and having an anterior surface, a posterior surface and an optical axis, the method comprising: forming a contiguous three-dimensional patterned microstructure in the body by modifying a plurality of contiguous loci in a layer of the body by optically distributing a focused laser beam on each locus causing a nonlinear absorption of photons in the optical material of each modified locus resulting in a change to the refractive index of the optical material in each locus, wherein the contiguous three-dimensional patterned microstructure comprises a phase shifting optical structure that modifies the at least one optical property of the lens, said phase shifting optical structure comprising a plurality of full-wave, phase-wrapped zones that compensate for optical path length differences within an array of neighboring light rays.