Lens

Contact lenses get pretty thin nowadays, but they’ve got nothing on a new lens from scientists at Stanford and the University of Amsterdam. The team has created the world’s thinnest lens, measuring just three atoms thick.

Researchers have developed a more precise design for "optical tweezers," using a metasurface lens studded with millions of tiny pillars which focus light to trap and manipulate individual atoms. It could pave the way for powerful quantum devices.

Ultra wide-angle fisheye lenses are typically thick, bulbous contraptions, that can't easily be incorporated into devices such as smartphones. That could be about to change, though, as engineers have now created one that's completely flat.

​We already see the outside world through the windows of our home or the windshield of our car, so … why not use those things as camera lenses, instead of utilizing separate security or obstacle-avoidance cameras? Thanks to a new system created at the University of Utah, that could be a possibility.

Researchers working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a flat silicon metamaterial lens that controls the properties of light in ways that normal optical lenses cannot hope to emulate.