Ultra-thin camera lenses could see the light of day

In the future, camera lenses could be thousands of times thinner and significantly less resource-intensive to manufacture. Researchers from Chalmers now present a new technology for making the artificial materials known as ‘metasurfaces’, which consist of a multitude of interacting nanoparticles that together can control light. They could have great use in the optical technology of tomorrow. ​​​​​

Metasurfaces can be used for optical components in portable electronics, sensors, cameras or space satellites. The Chalmers researchers' new technology for making such planar surfaces is based on a plastic that is already used today to create other microstructures.

“We put a thin layer of this plastic on a glass plate and, using a well-established technique called electron-beam lithography, we can draw detailed patterns in the plastic film, which after development will constitute the metasurface. The resulting device can focus light just like a normal camera lens, but it is thousands of times thinner – and can be flexible too,” says Daniel Andrén, a PhD student at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and first author of the scientific article recently published in the journal ACS Photonics.

Celý článek na Chalmers University of Technology

Image Credit: Daniel Andrén a Yen Strandqvist

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