02 September 2012

Flat Lens ~ Phased Array of Optical Antennas...

Cool work at Harvard SEAS on making a really Flat Lens...
"Our flat lens opens up a new type of technology,” says principal investigator Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS. “We’re presenting a new way of making lenses. Instead of creating phase delays as light propagates through the thickness of the material, you can create an instantaneous phase shift right at the surface of the lens. It’s extremely exciting.” [...] The flat lens eliminates optical aberrations such as the “fish-eye” effect that results from conventional wide-angle lenses. Astigmatism and coma aberrations also do not occur with the flat lens, so the resulting image or signal is completely accurate and does not require any complex corrective techniques. The array of nanoantennas, dubbed a “metasurface,” can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle, and spacing of the antennas. “In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta."
(Thanks to Wired's Jakob Schiller for spotting)

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