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-producible, all-glass, centimeter-scale metalenses capable of focusing visible light, using deep-ultraviolet (DUV) projection lithography, a manufacturing technique widely used by computer chip foundries. These metalenses exhibit diffraction-limited performance and are suitable for potential applications in virtual reality (VR) devices and biological imaging techniques. Since the metalenses are also very light, we believe that they are ideal for camera applications where payload weight and footprint size are important, such as in drones and cubesats. This work was published in Nano Letters and can be found here. See a press release from Harvard SEAS here.

Large metalens