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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 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?