Metalenses as a miniturized replacement for conventional refractive optics

Synopsis

Many experiments, imaging techniques, and modern technology employ lenses for collimating, focusing, and controlling light. For the most part these lenses are based on the refraction of light using bulky lenses. Meta materials provide an avenue for the miniaturization of these conventional refractive optics into planar structures. In recent work by Mohammadreza Khorasaninejad, Wei Ting Chen, Robert C. Devlin, Jaewon Oh, Alexander Y. Zhu, Federico Capasso a meta material based lens has been constructed that can focus visible light achieving diffraction-limited focusing and subwavelength resolution imaging. This new lens is shown to be capable of application in laser-based microscopy, imaging, and spectroscopy as a replacement for conventional refractive lenses. This talk will provide an overview of both meta materials and the construction, theory, and performance of the above authors’ new metalens.