Flat visible-light metalens
Metalente plana de luz visible
- Date
- 2016 · confidence high
- Place
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Federico Capasso and Mohammadreza Khorasaninejad (Harvard)
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A flat lens of titanium-dioxide nanopillars that focuses visible light almost to the diffraction limit with a thickness of a fraction of a micron. It replaces bulky curved lenses with a sheet made by lithography.
Infrared metalenses existed from 2011 (Yu, Capasso); the 2016 visible one was the first close in quality to a conventional lens. The path to mass production remains open.
What it led to
- thinner cameras and sensors
- augmented-reality optics
- lens manufacturing by semiconductor lithography