Meant to be Seen

Hi,

New research published by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences shows that a thin planar lens can be made to compensate for chromatic aberration in optical systems.

This invention potentially means complex achromatic lens systems can be made much lighter and more compact.

For instance the bulky, spaced achromatic doublet lenses now being proposed for the OSVR head-mounted display could be made with one thin lens.

Obviously, for head-mounted and near-eye viewing applications, this could mean a revolutionary simplification of the optics now being used.

Article is here at Physorg: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-captured-u ... -lens.html


Thanks.

A fascinating prospect.
If I understand correctly, they start off with a blazed diffractive grating and then add in dielectric resonators (the metamaterial part) which will delay different wavelengths by different amounts to compensate for the different diffractive responses.

The paper is behind a paywall, but I wonder if this broadband or just 3 narrow bands?
If it is just 3 narrow bands then multiple recordings for holographic optical element would have the same outcome of single element focus for 3 wavelengths.

Chromatic aberration is really the least important aspect here. That the easiest thing to correct in software. But if I am understanding correctly it suggests that you would have significant control over distortion and field curvature. That would be very exciting.

brantlew, is the optical distortion you mention of the same type that is suppressed by the Wearality lenses and is it something that can be built into holographic and relief diffractive lenses without the metamaterial component?

Haloar wrote:brantlew, is the optical distortion you mention of the same type that is suppressed by the Wearality lenses and is it something that can be built into holographic and relief diffractive lenses without the metamaterial component?

It's the same thing that they "claim" is suppressed by their lenses, but in practice you cannot avoid distortion with single element lenses.