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.

Chemical reactions are determined at their most fundamental level by their respective electronic structure and dynamics. Steered by a stimulus such as light irradiation, electrons rearrange themselves in liquids or solids. This process takes only a few hundred attoseconds, whereby one attosecond is the billionth part of a billionth of a second.