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Researchers Develop Flat Lens a Thousand Times Thinner Than a Human Hair

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

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:38PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:38PM (#1042196)

    https://cns1.rc.fas.harvard.edu/single-metalens-focuses-entire-visible-spectrum-light-one-point/ [harvard.edu]

    Harvard has one of these metalenses too. This one claims it solves prior problems of chromatic aberration, so it's "color corrected".

    “One of the biggest challenges in designing an achromatic broadband lens is making sure that the outgoing wavelengths from all the different points of the metalens arrive at the focal point at the same time,” said Wei-Ting Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and first author of the paper. “By combining two nanofins into one element, we can tune the speed of light in the nanostructured material, to ensure that all wavelengths in the visible are focused in the same spot, using a single metalens. This dramatically reduces thickness and design complexity compared to composite standard achromatic lenses.”

    “Using our achromatic lens, we are able to perform high-quality, white-light imaging. This brings us one step closer to the goal of incorporating them into common optical devices such as cameras,” said Alexander Zhu, co-author of the study.

    Next, the researchers aim to scale up the lens, to about 1 cm in diameter. This would open a whole host of new possibilities, such as applications in virtual and augmented reality.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:47PM

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:47PM (#1042275)

    Yeah I saw that too. I googled around trying to find AI deep-fake style automated chromatic aberration correction, didn't find much.

    In the long run I think it'll be cheaper and faster to fix it in post using a CPU rather than trying to make truly aberration free lenses.

    This applies to microscopes too. Eventually I bet the only aberration free optics will be photon limited stuff like astronomy telescopes. Everything else will just use software to fix everything.

    I'd bet money on this if I knew where to invest the money. Glass optics is dead, the "fancy" expensive stuff is all going away. Just use a shit cheap lens with special AI cleaning up the captured image.

    Why put hundreds of dollars into a microscope Plan Apochromat or even cheap flourite objective if you can replace hundreds of dollars of engineered glass with 50 cents of CPU and software?

    Heck why bother correcting field curvature if you have the focus knob on a servo and enough CPU memory and AI to photo-merge it all together?

    The idea of looking thru a microscope like the old days will be quaint when modern scope users just put on the VR Goggles instead.