SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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)
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:15PM (3 children)
Can someone explain to me, preferably in words of one syllable, what the advantage is to a smartphone of the lens being 1/1000 the thicckness of a human hair. Sounds a bit fragile to me.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:36PM
Less raw material is needed to make it (maybe photolithography adds more overheads though; I don't know) and it builds in potentially quicker obsolescence, so it's a win-win. Oh, and they can boast how their new iPhone is even thinner than a piece of toilet paper so you simply must upgrade to get rid of that laughable old thick wedge of a phone you got there.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:50PM
If you make it thin enough, you use it by plating it on something else. So the lens itself isn't fragile, merely the glass you plate it onto.
Otherwise, really thin stuff can be bent at weird angles without damage. The way that it's damaged is by ripples or tears. So it might be fragile to swiping a finger across, but not to being bent. So you sandwich it between two sheets of plastic with the desired properties, or even glass. Since this is a "programmable lens" you're going to want to connect a bunch of controls to it...but I'm not sure what kind of control. Possibly magnetic or electric fields, or even some frequency of em radiation. You probably wouldn't be using visible light for that, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:57PM
lighter VR headgear