optique

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.

Optical crystallography is the branch of science that focuses on the optical properties of crystals. Also known as crystal optics, it describes the behavior of light in anisotropic media, such as crystals, in which the light behaves differently depending on which direction the light is traveling.