Understanding of optics has changed no end since the world’s oldest known lens was ground nearly 3,000 years ago in modern-day Iraq. Yet its Assyrian maker would instantly recognise today’s lenses, which continue to be made much as they were then: by fashioning a piece of transparent material into a solid with curved surfaces. Just as invariably, the curves introduce optical aberrations whose correction requires tweaking the lens’s geometry in complicated ways. As a consequence, lenses remain bulky, especially by the standards of modern electronics.
Enter Federico Capasso, of Harvard University. He and his colleagues have created a lens that is completely flat and the width of two human hairs. It works because its features, measured in nanometres (billionths of a metre), make it a “metamaterial”, endowed with some weird and useful properties.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics, a particle of light, called a photon, can take literally any possible path between source A and point B. However, those same laws stipulate that the path of least time is the most likely. When a photon is travelling through a uniform medium, like a vacuum, that amounts to a straight line. But although its speed in a vacuum is constant, light travels at different (lower) speeds in different media. For example, it moves more slowly in glass than it does in air. So in a medium composed of both air and glass, light’s most likely path from A to B will depend on the thickness of glass it needs to traverse, as well as the total distance it needs to cover. That means that the light may sometimes prefer to bend. This is the quantum-mechanical basis of refraction.
In order to maximise the probability that photons from A will end up precisely at B, those going in a straight line need to be slowed down relative to those taking a more circuitous route, so that, in effect, all hit B the same time. This can be done by forcing the former to pass through more glass than the latter. The result is a round piece of glass that is thick in the middle, where the straight-line path crosses, and tapers off towards the edge, where the less direct routes do—in other words, a focusing lens, with its focal point at B.
Dr Capasso’s lens, described in Nano Letters, also slows photons down. But instead of using varying thickness of glass to do the job, he and his team created an array of antennae which absorb photons, hold on to them for a short time and then release them. In order for this trick to work, though, the distance between the antennae has to be smaller than the wavelength of the light being focused. In Dr Capasso’s case that means less than 1,550 nanometres, though he thinks that with tweaking it could be made to work with shorter-wavelength visible light, too.
Creating the array involved coating a standard silicon wafer, 250 microns thick, with a 60-nanometre layer of gold. Most of this layer was then stripped away using a technique called electron-beam litography, leaving behind a forest of V-shaped antennae arranged in concentric circles. By fiddling with their precise shape, after much trial and error, antennae lying on different circles could be coaxed into holding on to the photons for slightly different lengths of time, mimicking an ordinary glass lens. The whole fragile system can be sandwiched between two sheets of transparent material to make it more robust.
At present the new-fangled lens only works for monochromatic light and so is unlikely to replace the glass sort in smartphone cameras anytime soon. But it could revolutionise instruments that rely on single-colour lasers, by making further minaturisation possible while eliminating the optical aberrations inherent to glass lenses. Such devices include laser microscopes, which are used to capture high-resolution images of cells, or optical data storage, where a more accurate and smaller lens could help squeeze more information into ever less space.
First published on economist.com.
References:
- Capasso et al., Aberration-Free Ultrathin Flat Lenses and Axicons at Telecom Wavelengths Based on Plasmonic Metasurfaces, Nano Letters, 2012.
- Capasso et al., Light Propagation with Phase Discontinuities: Generalized Laws of Reflection and Refraction, Science, 2011.
Also appeared in The Economist. Also available in audio here.
Image credit: Francesco Aieta
Akshat Rathi 