Fractal Antenna Awarded Flat Lens Patent for Lens With Fractal Metamaterials

Antenna and embedded component developer Fractal Antenna Systems Inc. has been awarded a U.S. patent for a flat lens with fractal metamaterials to bend electromagnetic waves.

Blowup of a tiny fractal metasurface (metamaterial surface) shows fractal "atoms" used to control waves, such as with the new flat lens technology. Courtesy of Fractal Antenna Systems.

The flat lens technology uses fractals, intricate patterns built up as repeating scaled shapes, to make more complex designs. With wide bandwidth, these fractal atoms act as a metamaterial surface, or a close-packed resonator array, that accomplishes the wave bending that previously required curved, thick lens shapes with differences in refractive indices.

The fractals provide advantages in ease of manufacturing, bandwidth, spectral use, and field of view that are not attained by other metasurface approaches. Controlling and bending these waves with the fractals leads to magnification and other interesting options.

Fractal Antenna has been developing fractal metasurface technology for more than 10 years, and the new patent is one of several that has been filed and is pending on the flat lens-related technology, encompassing microwaves up to visible light and beyond. For example, LEDs equipped with the new flat lens technology may produce brighter or lower-power-usage lighting, and flat lens-assisted array layers of LEDs may produce 3D displays that can be viewed without special glasses or holograms. Potential applications for the flat lens technology include telecommunications and surveillance.

“As an astrophysicist, I am intimately familiar with the limitations of conventional optics,” said Nathan Cohen, CEO of Fractal Antenna. “We are proud to be the recognized inventors of flat lens technology via patent issuance. Now, we will be giving eyes to things that previously were too cumbersome or expensive to provide improved views, especially on small and nano scales. Flat lenses are a revolution in the works and the realization.”