Input 2021.01.01 20:00
One hundredth of a hair, one tenth of a thousandth of a conventional glass lens
Only infrared still… “Commercialization of cameras and sensors in 3 years”
Expected to solve smartphone’Katuktu’ with follow-up research on visible light lens–
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The Ministry of Science and Technology Information and Communication announced that the joint research team of Joon-Seok Noh, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering of POSTECH, and Seung-Hoon Han, Master of Imaging Device Lab at Samsung Electronics Advanced Institute of Technology, developed the world’s first infrared ultra-thin’meta lens’ and mass production technology of it using’meta material’. Sun said.
The research results were published on this day in the journal’ACS Nano’ published by the American Chemical Society (ACS). The joint research team plans to commercialize this technology as a lens for infrared cameras three years later, and then apply it to smartphone cameras.
In order to collect light and obtain a clear image, a convex lens is needed that breaks the direction of light and collects it into one point. Existing convex lenses made of glass must have a thickness of at least 1cm to collect light effectively. This is why the lens weight of high-performance DSLR cameras exceeds 4kg, and the thickness of smartphone cameras has technical limitations.
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A meta lens is a flat lens in which 50 nanometers (nm·1 billionth of a meter) of nanoparticles are regularly arranged on the surface. Although it is not actually convex, the nanoparticles refract light and collect light at one point like a convex lens.
As a result of attaching a test lens with a diameter of 4 mm to the actual infrared camera, the research team performed the same function of the existing infrared camera, such as photographing the distribution of blood vessels in human skin.
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Prof. Roh said, “The timing of commercialization is expected to be 3 to 5 years later.” .
Metalenses can only be used to collect infrared, not visible light. Although lenses for visible light have already been developed, the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple lights that make up visible light have different refractive indices (the degree of bending when passing through the lens), so they are separated from each other when passing through the lens. Remains. The research team plans to solve this problem and apply the technology to general visible light cameras and sensors.
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