Meta-Optics: The disruptive technology set to bring the stuff of science-fiction stories into everyday devices

Robots and self-driving cars will see far beyond the capabilities of the human eye, reveals a review of the growing field of meta-optics.

MetaOptics advances science and technology well beyond the 3000-year-old optical paradigm that relies on visual human-machine interfaces such as cell phone cameras, microscope lenses, drones and telescopes. Optics are the technology bottleneck that meta-optics seeks to transform, bringing sci-fi stories to everyday devices.

Flowering since the early 2000s, thanks to the conceptualization of materials with negative refractive indices that can form perfect lenses, the field has grown rapidly over the past five years and now sees about 3000 publications per year. increase.

This accelerating research volume is impossible for scientists and engineers to navigate, so Nature Photonics turned to the leaders of meta-optics research for review. Professor Dragomir Neshev is his Director of the Center for his ARC Center of Excellence (TMOS) for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems. ) and Professor of Physics at the Australian National University, UNSW He is Professor Andrei Miroshnichenko of Canberra.

They found that the sector was on the brink of industrial turmoil.

“A major driving force in the metaoptics field is the integration of metaoptical elements and devices into optical systems to provide consumer optoelectronic applications,” the authors write.

“Importantly, meta-optical systems will enable new applications that were previously unthinkable and add to the so-called Industry 4.0. Such applications include the Internet of Things, self-driving cars, wearable devices, Augmented Reality, Remote Sensing.”

The importance of this technology is demonstrated by large investments from industry giants such as Apple, Google and Samsung. These companies are hiring graduates and investing in the field specifically to develop vision applications.

Beyond vision, however, the authors point out that the non-traditional properties of meta-optics can also be used for lightsails, LiFi, and thermal management.

These features derive from the meta-optical use of surfaces patterned with regular nanoscale structures, as opposed to conventional optics of mirrors and lenses. The result is a miniature component that scatters and manipulates light in ways that surprised Isaac his Newtonians.

The first commercial components exploiting these properties are already on the market, with companies such as Metalenz, NIL Technology and Meta Materials Inc offering flat metalens, polarization imaging, microscopy and biosensing.

These devices also allow access to properties of light (such as polarization and phase) that cannot be detected by the human eye, and can also be used for the engineering, manipulation, and quantum state of light, for quantum imaging, sensing, and communication.

However, the authors also found challenges in this area. The first of these is the ability to scale up to industrial processes compatible with current industry standard his CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) manufacturing technology. Especially since most meta-optical components rely on transparent substrates instead of CMOS.

Second, the ability to create tunable or reconfigurable metamaterials to enable dynamic components (much like the pixels on a television screen can change color many times per second) is , proved to be elusive.

“This is an open question and has been raised as a major challenge in this field. .

“There is a misconception that it has been done. People are taking small steps and predicting the distant future in papers. But no one can actually modulate phase at the pixel level in large arrays. “

Professor Neshev says that meta-optics technology has great potential if these issues can be resolved.

“MetaOptics as a platform is very flexible and can be embedded in any product, be it a phone, computer, car or satellite.

“It offers the ultimate miniaturization of optics in terms of size, weight and power. It enables human-device interfaces that are not possible with traditional optics, such as 3D vision and augmented reality. , which is very difficult with conventional optics,” said Professor Neshev.

“And finally, if you can change the phase of light passing through a component, you can do almost any image processing. That would be a big game changer.”

Original: Meta-Optics: Unexpected Disruptive Technology

Than: Australian National University | University of New South Wales