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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In the future, camera lenses could be thousands of times thinner and significantly less resource-intensive to manufacture. Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, now present a new technology for making artificial materials known as metasurfaces, which consist of a multitude of interacting nanoparticles that, together, can control light. They could have great use in the optical technology of tomorrow.
Metasurfaces can be used for optical components in portable electronics, sensors, cameras or space satellites. The Chalmers researchers' new technology for making such planar surfaces is based on a plastic that is already used today to create other microstructures.
"We put a thin layer of this plastic on a glass plate and, using a well-established technique called electron-beam lithography, we can draw detailed patterns in the plastic film, which, after development, will form the metasurface. The resulting device can focus light just like a normal camera lens, but it is thousands of times thinner—and can be flexible too," says Daniel Andrén, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and first author of the scientific article recently published in the journal ACS Photonics.
[...] "Our method could be a step toward large-scale production of metasurfaces. That is the goal we are already working toward today. Metasurfaces can help us create different effects and offer various technological possibilities. The best is yet to come," says Ruggero Verre, a researcher at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and co-author of the scientific article.
Journal Reference:
Daniel Andrén, et al. Large-Scale Metasurfaces Made by an Exposed Resist [open], ACS Photonics (2020). (DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01809)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2020, @05:05PM
I haven't paid much attention to metamaterials in a while now. I've looked at them like "machine learning" where it is almost all hype and promises of transformational advances. Does this work for more than a single wavelength? If not, I'll toss it in the hype bin with all of the other "one step closer to" stories of cloaking, planar lenses, perfect reflectors/absorbers, etc., etc., etc.
Yes it is cool, it is a great article to have here, and yes I even understand the physics behind it. One of my pet peeves is the "one step closer to" PR statements because when that phrase is used, it is almost never used in the context of "one step closer" on a 5-step journey, but "one step closer" on a million-step journey. For instance, almost every quantum entanglement story had to include the "one step closer to Star Trek transportation" nonsense (not to mention any story about fusion power generation in the last 30 years, but my hope there is that we can get to five steps left on that million step journey in my lifetime).