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Capasso Lab Reports Planar Metalens Designed

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Julia Germaine, News Editor

Materials science has made a great leap forward toward replacing glass lenses with metasurface materials that are practical to manufacture and produce aberration-free, subwavelength-resolution images. The planar metalens could replace traditional optics in smartphones, digital cameras and microscopes to enable further miniaturization of those devices.


Light passing through the metalens is focused by the array of nanostructures on its surface. Courtesy of Capasso Lab/Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The work was performed in the lab of physics and applied engineering professor Federico Capasso of Harvard University, whose contributions to the field of photonics, in addition to metasurface research and development, include the quantum cascade laser. Capasso discussed the technology with Photonics Media ahead of the study’s release.

“We are reporting planar lenses … that operate at visible wavelengths, and the potential, we think, is huge to replace conventional lenses in a lot of applications,” Capasso said.

The metasurface lens features towers of titanium dioxide — about 600 nm in length — which focus light based on their patterning, enabling a uniform-thickness component. In the metasurface lens, the towers bend light toward the focal point; the researchers reported the metalens achieved the same resolution and magnification as a traditional glass lens 5 to 6 cm in length.

Capasso also said that fabrication of the planar lenses could become highly cost-effective, due to the technology’s compatibility with memory and microprocessor chip foundries. The planar lenses could be fabricated similar to integrated circuits and do not require polishing or complicated post-processing steps, as glass optics do.

The video below describes the metalens and is courtesy of Science/AAAS.


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Published: June 2016
Glossary
metalens
A metalens, short for "metasurface lens," is a type of optical lens that uses nanostructured materials to manipulate light at a subwavelength scale. Unlike traditional lenses made of glass or other transparent materials, metalenses do not rely on the curvature of their surface to refract or focus light. Instead, they use carefully engineered patterns of nanostructures, such as nanoscale antennas or dielectric structures, to control the phase and amplitude of light across the lens's surface....
microscope
An instrument consisting essentially of a tube 160 mm long, with an objective lens at the distant end and an eyepiece at the near end. The objective forms a real aerial image of the object in the focal plane of the eyepiece where it is observed by the eye. The overall magnifying power is equal to the linear magnification of the objective multiplied by the magnifying power of the eyepiece. The eyepiece can be replaced by a film to photograph the primary image, or a positive or negative relay...
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