SoylentNews

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)

Original Submission