“Until recently, metalenses—flat ‘lenses’ that can focus light using nanopillars on their surface — were a cool-but-limited area of study when it came to photography,” DL Cade reports for Digital Photography Review. “Sure, these flat lenses are 100,000x thinner than glass, but they could only work with a limited range of colors, making it unlikely they’d appear in a cameras module any time soon.”
“That all changed this week, however, when a team at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) announced that they had succeeded in developing the first metalens that can focus the entire spectrum of visible light, including white light, onto a single point in high resolution,” Cade reports. “This is a huge breakthrough.”
“The details of how this is achieved can get a bit complicated—involving how they pair and space the ‘nanofins’ on the metalens itself — but the result is easy enough to understand,” Cade reports. “An achromatic flat lens that comes with three very big advantages over traditional glass lenses, as the paper’s lead author Federico Capasso explains: ‘Metalenses are thin, easy to fabricate and cost effective. This breakthrough extends those advantages across the whole visible range of light. This is the next big step.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dare we dream it? No more camera bump!