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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the picture-this dept.

Researchers develop flat lens a thousand times thinner than a human hair:

A lens that is a thousand times thinner than a human hair has been developed in Brazil by researchers at the University of São Paulo's São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP). It can serve as a camera lens in smartphones or be used in other devices that depend on sensors.

[...] The lens consists of a single nanometric layer of silicon on arrays of nanoposts that interact with light. The structure is printed by photolithography, a well-known technique used to fabricate transistors.

This kind of lens is known as a metalens.

[...] "Our lens has an arbitrary field of view, which ideally can reach 180° without image distortion," Rezende Martins said. "We've tested its effectiveness for an angle of 110°. With wider angles of view, light energy decreases owing to the shadow effect, but this can be corrected by post-processing."

Previously metalenses have been limited in their field of view. This lens opens up a much wider range of possibilities.

Journal Reference:
Augusto Martins, et. al.,On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View, ACS Photonics (DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00479)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:03PM (6 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:03PM (#1042177) Journal

    So is this a Fresnel lens with the breaks invisibly microscopic? Fresnals are kinda neat, but I never did care for all the circles it superimposes on the view.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:42PM (#1042198)

    Both are "flat", but otherwise not the same. These new things have elements that are on the same order as the wavelength of light. Fresnel lens elements are >> light wavelength.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:50PM (3 children)

    by richtopia (3160) on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:50PM (#1042199) Homepage Journal

    Actually it is a meta lens. I had to look that up myself: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-lens-world-metalens-liquid-crystal.html [phys.org]

    My understanding is the lens can be modified by an energy source (manipulated thermally, electrically, magnetically or optically), allowing a programmable lens.

    Particularly for a mobile phone that could be a game changer: a small footprint which can cover both wide angle down to potentially telephoto. It could remove the requirement for phones to have multiple cameras with different lenses.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:54PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:54PM (#1042226)

      And this helps improve porn how?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:38PM (#1042269)

        > And this helps improve pron how?

        Well, upskirts will be color corrected and in focus, no matter where the new and much smaller camera is located...of course they are still just ethically-challenged (and illegal) as ever.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:28PM (#1042301)

      Unless there is some great breakthrough here, the problem with metalenses of any kind, whether it be for making flat optics or "cloaking" devices, is that they essentially only work at a single wavelength. Other wavelengths don't interact the same way as the one it was tuned for, so it is always "some day" that these "can be used in a cell phone". That step between now and "some day" has been very large.

  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday August 27 2020, @07:56PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Thursday August 27 2020, @07:56PM (#1042875)

    No, I don't think so. I believe it's using structures on the order of size of wavelength of visible light, making them diffractive and not refractive lenses (Fresnel lenses).

    This quote from the summary annoyed me a little, "We've tested its effectiveness for an angle of 110°. With wider angles of view, light energy decreases owing to the shadow effect, but this can be corrected by post-processing."

    Just say it has an effective FoV of 110deg. Obviously post-processing cannot compensate for lack of light, or at least significantly reduces your options as you will have to blast the scene with an absurd amount of light.