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A metalens, composed of an array of nanostructures with arbitrary rotational angles, acquires an image, which is restored to generate an output image that closely approximates the quality of the original “ground truth” image. Credit: Seo et al., doi 10.1117/1.AP.6.6.066002. ============================================================================ AI-powered metalenses enable high-resolution, full-color imaging for compact optical systems. Modern imaging systems, including those in smartphones, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) devices, are continually advancing to achieve greater compactness, efficiency, and performance. Conventional optical systems, which depend on bulky glass lenses, face challenges such as chromatic aberrations, inefficiency across multiple wavelengths, and large physical sizes. These...

Polished glass has been at the center of imaging systems for centuries. Their precise curvature enables lenses to focus light and produce sharp images, whether the object in view is a single cell, the page of a book, or a far-off galaxy. Changing focus to see clearly at all these scales typically requires physically moving a lens, by tilting, sliding, or otherwise shifting the lens, usually with the help of mechanical parts that add to the bulk of microscopes and telescopes. Now MIT engineers have fabricated a tunable “metalens” that can focus on objects at multiple depths, without changes to...

Columbia Engineering researchers have created the first flat lens capable of correctly focusing a large range of colors of any polarization to the same focal spot without the need for any additional elements. Only a micron thick, their revolutionary "flat" lens is much thinner than a sheet of paper and offers performance comparable to top-of-the-line compound lens systems. The findings of the team, led by Nanfang Yu, associate professor of applied physics , are outlined in a new study, published today by Light: Science & Applications. A conventional lens works by routing all the light falling upon it through different...