All-glass, large-diameter metalens working at visible wavelengths made with conventional computer chip manufacturing methods

November 23, 2019

Large metalens

Metalenses are flat lenses that are ultrathin and lightweight, and are typically realized by placing millions to billions of nano-structures on a surface. The large number of structures makes scalability in both size and production scale a major concern. In our recent work, we demonstrate mass-...

Laughing gas laser: Widely tunable compact terahertz gas lasers with nitrous oxide

November 15, 2019

Laughing gas laser

We recently demonstrated a molecular gas laser that emits at frequencies between 250 GHz up to almost 1 THz using nitrous oxide (commonly known as laughing gas) as the gain medium. This laser relies on the optical pumping of the gas by a quantum cascade laser and can be generalized to a large number...

Flatland light: polariton nanophotonics

November 13, 2019

Polariton

Hexagonal boron nitride is a layered material with some very interesting optical properties: when the edge of a thin flake of boron nitride is illuminated with infrared light, part of the light becomes trapped inside the flake and can only propagate across the two-dimensional surface of the flake as a surface wave – known as a... Read more about Flatland light: polariton nanophotonics

Compact metalens depth sensor inspired by spiders

November 13, 2019

Spider eye metalens

In recent work, we have shown that a multi-functional metalens can be designed to mimic the eyes of a certain class of spiders found in nature, whose multi-layered retinae allow for the acquisition of multiple images at varying degrees of focus. From these multiple images, a depth image can be...

Matrix Fourier optics and polarization imaging

August 7, 2019

Polarization camera

Metasurfaces, nanophotonic arrays of phase shifting elements with subwavelength spacing, may have elements designed with form birefringence. This makes metasurfaces a particularly interesting platform for new polarization optics. In new work published in Science, we present a unifying...

Frequency combs and variational principles

June 27, 2019

Comb

Nature has a way of finding optimal solutions to complex problems. For example, despite the billions of ways for a single protein to fold, proteins always fold in a way that minimizes potential energy. Slime mold, a brainless organism, always finds the most efficient route to a food source, even when presented with an...

Capasso Group

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