CANBERRA, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) — Scientists in Australia and Germany have created ultra-thin multilayer lenses offering lightweight, affordable imaging for smartphones, drones, and satellites.
The research team has designed multilayer “metalenses” that overcome limitations of earlier single-layer metamaterial lenses, according to a statement released Thursday by the Australian National University (ANU).
Unlike traditional glass lenses that bend light using curved surfaces, metalenses use tiny nanostructures, smaller than the wavelength of light, to control and focus light in a very thin, flat layer, according to the study led by Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany in collaboration with ANU and the Australian Research Council (ARC) Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS).
The new multilayer lens design can focus different colors of light from normal light sources at the same time, over relatively large areas, a breakthrough for practical imaging devices, said the study’s first author Joshua Jordaan of ANU and ARC-TMOS.
“It’s easy to manufacture because it has a low aspect ratio and each layer can be fabricated individually and then packaged together,” Jordaan said, adding that the lens focuses light correctly regardless of the light waves’ orientation and can be mass-produced using existing semiconductor manufacturing technologies.
Using a special computer design algorithm, the team created a library of metamaterial elements in shapes like squares, clovers, and propellers that can control how light is focused very precisely, according to the findings published in Optics Express, overseen by the Optical Society of America.
“The metalenses we have designed would be ideal for drones or earth-observation satellites, as we’ve tried to make them as small and light as possible,” Jordaan said. ■