Thursday, August 23, 2012

Flat lens offers a perfect image — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Flat lens offers a perfect image — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: At a mere 60 nanometers thick, the flat lens is essentially two-dimensional, yet its focusing power approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Operating at telecom wavelengths (i.e., the range commonly used in fiber-optic communications), the new device is completely scalable, from near-infrared to terahertz wavelengths, and simple to manufacture...


Capasso and his collaborators at SEAS create the flat lens by plating a very thin wafer of silicon with a nanometer-thin layer of gold. Next, they strip away parts of the gold layer to leave behind an array of V-shaped structures, evenly spaced in rows across the surface. When Capasso’s group shines a laser onto the flat lens, these structures act as nanoantennas that capture the incoming light and hold onto it briefly before releasing it again. Those delays, which are precisely tuned across the surface of the lens, change the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would, with an important distinction.

The flat lens eliminates optical aberrations such as the “fish-eye” effect that results from conventional wide-angle lenses...

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