Researchers developed a completely flat lens big enough to use in a telescope - and take a picture of the Moon - by AndyTomaswick
First, it is repeatable at high speed. The team, led by Dr. Xingjie Ni, did what all good problem solvers do. They took a large problem – in this case, how to cover the surface of a 4 cm circle with nanostructured antennas – and broke it down into manageable chunks. Those chunks turned out to be 22 mm x 22 mm regions of the plate, and they then patterned the necessary antenna structures onto the lens using a DUV system at Cornell.
A second advantage is DUV is capable of consistently producing small details. This is especially true when it’s used to create transistors on a computer chip, but in this case, the nanostructured antennas could be produced with the same level of precision. That isn’t to say the entire research process was as simple as running a new system to create a larger version of a known technology. The researchers had to significantly shrink the file size used to direct the DUV machine on how to operate. They did so by using data approximations and other file compression techniques.
The PSU research team displays their metalens. From left to right – graduate students Lidan Zhang, Shengyuan Chang, Md Tarek Rahman, and professor Xingjie Ni.Even with all that effort, challenges remain – the most notable being chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration occurs when different colors of light are bent by the nanostructured antennas differently. This creates different focal points for different colors of light, causing them to blur if collected in the same image. But Dr.
However, astronomy isn’t the only practical application for these larger metalenses. Despite their ubiquity, the lenses of a cell phone’s camera are still curved, which takes up valuable space in its design. Typically, you can see a protuberance near the camera lens on the slimmest cell phone models. With a true metalens that works as intended, those issues could be eliminated, leading to an extensive install base if cell phone manufacturers become interested.
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