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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: 1) by HammeredGlass on Wednesday August 26 2020, @11:21PM (2 children)
I would like to get contact lenses like this that rarely have to be removed if they could allow more oxygen to reach the eye.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @02:13AM (1 child)
The drawings I've seen show these metalenses as a field of little prisms (or more likely antennas--at the lengths of light wavelengths). There wasn't any obvious reason why the active elements need to be stuck to a solid substrate. Perhaps they can be attached together by something more like a screen to make them porous for contact lenses.
It's good to be alive, the solutions to a wide variety of medical problems are coming faster and faster these days.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 27 2020, @02:10PM
> the solutions to a wide variety of medical problems are coming faster and faster these days
thanks also to the bill and melinda gates foundation. What can possibly go wrong.
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