The word "lens" takes its name from the latin word for lentil. Both Are Both Hemispheric Shapes Bound Together on their flat surface. So a "flat lens" sounds like a contradiction of terms. Yet that is exactly What Andrei Faraon is working on at California Institute of Technology's Nanoscale and Quantum Optics Lab.
Why flat Lenses? They could be used in lots of places where conventional optical lesses are too bulky, faraon, a member of the kavli nanoscience institute at caltech, explained. Built onto semiconductor sensors, fringons could attach them to guide surgical tools and researchers could use them in microscopes designed to look at transparent objects inside cells.
There are Several Reasons Conventional Optical Lenses Fall Short for these and other applications. Those Lenses Work by Bending Light, so it focuses on single point in the center. Yet the Curves used to gather light conventional makes exisseed to manufacture. They also Distort Colors and Produce Less Sharp Images On their Edges. To correct for Those Flaws, Optical Systems Use Additional Lenses, Which Makes Them Bulky and More Expensive.
Finlly, in Today's Digital World, Engineers Must couple Those Lenses with a separate Image Sensor, Which Makes Them Even Bulkier and more costly.
Faraon Thought He Had a Clear Solution: Build A Flat Lens Using the Same Techniques Used To Fabricate Silicon Semiconductor Image Sensors So that the Lens and Sensor Form a Small, Single Integrated System.
But first, he had to find a way to collect and focus light using a flat surface.
That's What Metasurfaces do. They are surfaces made of conventional materials - in this case, silicon - shaped into nanosized that alter Howhose materials respond to light. The Most Famous Example of an Optical Metamaterial is a cloak development at Duke University that bends light and Makes Objects Appear Invisible.
Faraon's metasurfaches are dated with 600-nanomer-high silicon cylinders that alters the path and speed of light as it passes through them. (Light Always Moves The Same Speed in A Vacuum, but slows down when it pass through a medium like water or silicon.)
"As the light propagates through the pillars, it works like a convex lens," he said. "The Pillars in the Center Are Fatter, So They Delay Light Slightly Longer Than The Thinner Pillars on the Edge. »
Through Careful Calculations, Faraon's Team Designed An array of Pillars that B3wer all light too much on top of a flat image sensor like those used in smartphones and digital cameras.
At first, the metasurfaches produced images that were blurry surround the edges. SO, Faraon's group Borrowed A Trick Used by Convention Lenses and Put Two Metasurfaches on Top of Oneother (With the Nanopillars on the Outside).
This Enabled Him to Create a Lens that gathered light from a 70-degree viewing angle and focused it crisply on single plane. Faraon has also made flat telephoto lenses that zoom in on an image.
The Lenses Should also Be Easy to Mass Produce at Reasonable Cost, since they are made by the same silicon semiconductor technology used to make conventional image sensors.
"If you know what to do, it's simple to design compared with the design that goes into a computer processor," Faraon Said.
Yet Flat Lenses Have One Major Shortcoming: They Work for One Wavelength of Light Only. If a Camera With A Flat Lens Took A picture of an outdoor scene, all that would watch up on the image is a specific Wavelength of Red, Blue, or Another color.
Surprisingly, this is not a deal breaker. After All, Lasers and Led Lights also Emit Only A Single Wavelength of Light. So, any app that laser laser or led to illuminate something could use a flat lens to gather light reflect from that object.
That Makes Them Ideal for Surgical Like Endoscopes instruments. These are long, Thin Rods with Cameras and Led Lights at the End, Which Doctors insert into bodies and organs to perform minimally invasive surgery.
Coupled with infrared leds, it could be used as night vision cameras for security system.
Another possible use Lies in differential phase contrast imaging, a technique often used to look at transparent objects, like cells, inside cells, and crystals. It is very small different in the speed at which light, usually from an led, passes these objects to enhance the edge of the sample.
Faraon is Already Working on Several of These Applications, Proving that a flat lens is not really to contradiction in terms.
Source: Kavli Foundation
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