How Harvard University's Titanium Dioxide are Nanoscale Stonehenge Metalenses on Quartz Lens Optics

“This technology is potentially revolutionary because it works in the visible spectrum, which means it has the capacity to replace lenses in all kinds of devices, from microscopes to cameras, to displays and cell phones. In the near future, metalenses will be manufactured on a large scale at a small fraction of the cost of conventional lenses, using the foundries that mass produce microprocessors and memory chips.”

Professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Harvard University, Dr Federico Capasso, commenting on the developement of metalenses using Titanium dioxide

What would happen if a nanomaterial and a fresnel lens had children?

You'd get this metalenses as developed by researcher at Harvard University as described in “New 'Metamaterial Lens' is 100,000-times thinner than conventional Glass Optics”, published June 3, 2016 by Hillary Grigonis, Digitaltrends.

What the Dr Federico Capasso and his research team at Harvard University did is quite remarkable and is deserving of a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physics, at the very least. In fact, it’s similar to the work of Dr. Chunlei Guo's of University of Rochester who used lasers to make metallic surfaces hydrophobic as explained in my blog article entitled “How Dr. Chunlei Guo's of University of Rochester makes Hydrophobic Metal Surfaces using Lasers”.

So how does a metalens differ from an ordinary lens?

Harvard University's metalenses - Titanium dioxide Nanoscale Lego Bricks on a Field of Quartz

It differs in one major way; weight.

Dr Federico Capasso and his research team at Harvard University used a high powered free electrons laser to carve a stonehenge-like structure out of Titanium dioxide on the surface of layer of transparent quartz as described in “A Camera Lens Breakthrough Could See Smartphones Outperforming DSLRs”, published 03-06-2016 by Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo.

Titanium Dioxide (TiO₂) is the same substance used in the construction of the Ohio State University KAir battery that is made of a similar nanoscale structure made up of Titanium dioxide as described in my blog article entitled “@OhioState's Solar Battery - How KAir Energy Systems Solar Batteries might come to smartphones and Laptops”.

This massive nanostructure, with blocks 600 nanometers tall, was configured in such as way as to reflect photos to a single point. What’s more, it can focus visible light, as previous attempts at developing nanoscale optics focused on focusing light in the Ultravoilet spectrum.

Effectively, this is a nanoscale fresnel lens, which at 600 nanometers thick, is 100,000 times lighter and delivers focus that's sharper than a 55 millimetre lens.

Harvard’s metalens breakthrough – Improved Microscope, Telescope and Smartphone Camera Optics

This is quite a breakthrough, as lenses used in optics applications such as in microscopes as well as astronomy and photography needs multiple layers of glass to reduce distortions due to imperfections in the glass. The result is that these traditional lenses tend to be very large in size.

The potential breakthrough here is that this metalenses can be sculpted to have multiple lenses packed into one block of glass or other material, making is possible to have telephoto lenses made of single flat pieces of glass or other transparent material.

Again, comparable to a Fresnel lenses, which are typically thin lenses that have some serious magnifying power. So powerful, in fact, that it can magnify sunlight to decompose organic material in vacuum pyrolysis as demonstrated in my blog article entitled “How to upgrade your Solar Desalinator to a Solar Cooker and make a Solar Foundry for Vacuum Pyrolysis”.

It can also improve the resolving power of smaller reflector telescopes. This metalens can improve the reflecting power not only of quartz but any reflective material, even making non-reflective surface reflective via this nanoscale coating. Potentially too, this technique could be applied to Silver Salts used in making traditional lenses to reduce imperfections in traditional reflectors in Telescopes.

Using the same techniques use in making microchips, expect not only smaller single lens microscopes, telescopes and Digital SLR Cameras for photography but increased miniaturization of camera optics in smartphones.

A sharper smartphone selfie and cheaper optics thanks to Titanium dioxide Nanoscale Lego Bricks on a Field of Quartz!