The lens can be utilized to produce high-resolution images with a large field of vision. It can work as an electronic camera lens in mobile phones and can be utilized in other gadgets that depend upon sensing units (high resolution large angle selfie gotten utilizing metalens. Credit: Augusto Martins/USP
The lens can be utilized to produce high-resolution images with a large field of vision. It can work as an electronic camera lens in mobile phones and can be utilized in other gadgets that depend upon sensing units (high resolution large angle selfie gotten utilizing metalens.
A lens that is a thousand times thinner than a human hair has actually been established in Brazil by scientists at the University of São Paulo’s São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP). It can work as an electronic camera lens in mobile phones or be utilized in other gadgets that depend upon sensing units.
“In the present technological context, its applications are almost unlimited,” Emiliano Rezende Martins, a teacher in EESC-USP’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing and last author of a released paper on the innovation, informed Agência FAPESP.
The paper is entitled “On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View” and is released in AIR CONDITIONER Photonics. The research study was supported by FAPESP by means of a scholarship for a research study internship abroad granted to Augusto Martins, PhD prospect and lead author of the paper.
The lens includes a single nanometric layer of silicon on varieties of nanoposts that communicate with light. The structure is printed by photolithography, a widely known strategy utilized to produce transistors.
This type of lens is called a metalens. Metalenses were very first established 10 years back and accomplish the greatest resolution that is physically practical, utilizing an ultrathin selection of small waveguides called a metasurface that flexes light as it travels through the lens.
According to Rezende Martins, metalenses have actually long dealt with the issue that the angle of view is very little (less than 1°). “One way to solve the problem is to combine metalenses, forming complex structures,” he stated.
Based on the awareness that in a traditional lens a boost in refraction index increases the field of vision in percentage to the flatness of the lens, the authors created a metalens to simulate an absolutely flat lens with a boundless refraction index, which might not be gotten with a traditional lens.
“Our lens has an arbitrary field of view, which ideally can reach 180° without image distortion,” Rezende Martins stated. “We’ve tested its effectiveness for an angle of 110°. With wider angles of view, light energy decreases owing to the shadow effect, but this can be corrected by post-processing.”
Combining metalenses avoids super-resolution, however the resolution gotten suffices for all standard applications. Martins evaluated the metalens with a 3D printed cam and gotten high-resolution images with a large field of vision. “So far we’ve only succeeded in photographing in green, but in the months ahead we’ll upgrade the lens so that all colors are feasible,” he stated.
Reference: “On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View” by Augusto Martins, Kezheng Li, Juntao Li, Haowen Liang, Donato Conteduca, Ben-Hur V. Borges, Thomas F. Krauss and Emiliano R. Martins, 30 June 2020, AIR CONDITIONER Photonics.
DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00479
