Welcome to the Capasso Group!

Metalenz: the Harvard Capasso group start-up

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Read the story about Flat Optics, Professor Capasso, and Metalenz at the Harvard Gazette and his interview with Nature Photonics on Metaoptics for the consumer market.

Metalenz and UMC will fabricate mass-market metasurfaces in Singapore (Metalenz press release, Forbes article).

Find out more about Metalenz here: https://www.metalenz.com/. Also see a press release from the Harvard Office of Technology Development, a New York Times article, IEEE Spectrum, and an SPIE news article.

Latest News

4D metasurface under microscope

Two aspects of dark points in light

June 27, 2023

If you shine a laser pointer on a rough surface, you will notice that the reflected light creates a constellation of bright spots. However, less visible among these bright spots are threads of darkness known as optical singularites. Historically, these have been challenging to engineer. This month, the Capasso group has published two papers demonstrating powerful new tools to shape these dark regions using metasurfaces.

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Aun, Federico and Dima after both have successfully defended their theses.

Dr. Aun Zaidi and Dr. Dmitry Kazakov successfully defend theses!

June 9, 2023
We congratulate Dr. Dmitry Kasakov and Dr. Aun Zaidi on successfully defending their PhD theses and graduating this spring! In their time in the Capasso group, Dmitry has been working on active nonlinear mid-infrared photonics and Aun has been working on structuring and imaging polarization transformation using metasurfaces. We wish both all the best in their future scientific endeavors!
Jinsheng PRL

Using resonances as synthetic helicity for optical manipulation

May 1, 2023

Research on spin-orbit interactions in evanescent fields is crucial as it could revolutionize particle manipulation using light. This research, led by Dr Jinsheng Lu and published in Physical Review Letters, has uncovered a new kind of optical force that relies on the polarization of the incoming light or the particle being manipulated. We examined these phenomena in a microfiber-microcavity system with whispering gallery mode resonances, allowing for a clearer understanding and unification of polarization-dependent forces. Our findings challenge previous studies and suggest a...

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Light sheet holography

3D Holography with Light Sabers

April 13, 2023

Displaying virtual 3D objects with light using computer-generated holography is at the heart of AR/VR and the metaverse. Current methods display virtual 3D objects by projecting many image slices, parallel to each other, and to the plane of the display — thus discretizing the 3D image in the axial direction. This limits the quality and depth perception of the scene. To tackle this limitation, we projected our desired 3D image onto sheets of light that continuously flow away from display just like arrays of lightsabers. By packing many of these structured light...

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EUV metalens

EUV-ureka! A hole new world

April 6, 2023

Metalenses have revolutionized the way we control visible and infrared light, with numerous applications in research and technology. However, it has been challenging to use them for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light, which has much smaller wavelengths (around 50 nanometers) compared to visible light (400 to 700 nanometers). Since EUV light is absorbed by all materials, traditional lenses cannot bend and control it.

In this groundbreaking discovery, we have found that tiny holes in silicon can guide EUV light in a vacuum. This enables us to change the properties of EUV light on a...

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