An unexpected discovery in a Harvard lab has led to a breakthrough insight into choosing an unconventional material, silica, to make optical metasurfaces – ultra-thin, flat structures that control light at the nanoscale and are already replacing traditional optical devices like lenses and mirrors.
A team from the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and collaborators at the University of Lisbon led by professor Marco Piccardo, has found that in some cases, silica - the fundamental building block of glass - can be used for making metasurfaces despite long-held assumptions that it cannot bend light sufficiently for more specialized meta-optics. The research is published in Nano Letters.
To read more, click here.