Flat lens focuses light without distortion

[steve000]

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/flat-lens-offers-perfect-image

Check it out!

"Applied physicists at Harvard have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without the distortions of conventional lenses.

And by "ultrathin," they mean it — 60 nanometers thin. The big advantage for this technology, aimed at telecommunications signals, is that "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."

[MrB]

Very very interesting, thanks for sharing.

[Zhou]

60nm! that is approximately 1/10 the size of the wavelength of light that the human eye is most sensitive to (550-560nm).

cool :thumbsup:

[gary]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the link to the story which is fascinating.

When they mention that it is scalable from near-infrared to terahertz wavelengths
and simple to manufacture, it sounds like they might onto a big winner.

If it were just applicable to fiber-optic communications alone, its deployment
could become staggering, but there will be engineers and scientists out there
involved in totally different fields who will no doubt look at something like this
and think, "I have an amazing use for this".

[gary]

Fabricated using electron-beam lithography.

[rally]

Thanks Steve,

Interesting stuff that's for sure.

Each lens is specific to one narrow frequency of light and the losses are 20-40% ! Next year's version will be better no doubt

Just imagine a big 'filter' wheel on the front end of your empty focal tube - with an integrated narrow bandpass filter for each colour you want to image with !
I am not sure if they can make them to any large size yet, they mention being possible to get up to microscope objective so probably not in 2013

Paper here
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.2194

Rally

[steve000]

my thoughts exactly