Tiny new lenses, smaller than a hair, could transform phone and drone cameras

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Scientists have developed a new multi-layered metalens design that could revolutionize portable optics in devices like phones, drones, and satellites. By stacking metamaterial layers instead of relying on a single one, the team overcame fundamental limits in focusing multiple wavelengths of light. Their algorithm-driven approach produced intricate nanostructures shaped like clovers, propellers, and squares, enabling improved performance, scalability, and polarization independence.

The design uses layers of metamaterials to simultaneously focus a range of wavelengths from an unpolarized source and over a large diameter, overcoming a major limitation of metalenses, said the first author of the paper reporting the design, Mr Joshua Jordaan, from the Research School of Physics at the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS).

"Our design has a lot of nice features that make it applicable to practical devices."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250921090853.htm