Miniature optical planar camera based on a wide-angle metasurface doublet corrected for monochromatic aberrations

TL;DR

This paper presents a miniature flat camera using a metasurface doublet lens corrected for monochromatic aberrations, achieving wide-angle, high-efficiency imaging with diffraction-limited quality at 850 nm.

Contribution

It introduces a monolithic metasurface lens doublet integrated with an image sensor, enabling compact, high-performance optical imaging systems.

Findings

Achieved a small f-number of 0.9 with a wide 60°×60° field of view.

Operates at 850 nm wavelength with 70% focusing efficiency.

Demonstrated nearly diffraction-limited image quality.

Abstract

Optical metasurfaces are two-dimensional arrays of nano-scatterers that modify optical wavefronts at subwavelength spatial resolution. They are poised to revolutionize optics by enabling complex low-cost systems where multiple metasurfaces are lithographically stacked and integrated with electronics. For imaging applications, metasurface stacks can perform sophisticated image corrections and can be directly integrated with image sensors. Here, we demonstrate this concept with a miniature flat camera integrating a monolithic metasurface lens doublet corrected for monochromatic aberrations, and an image sensor. The doublet lens, which acts as a fisheye photographic objective, has a small $f$-number of 0.9, an angle-of-view larger than 60$^\circ\times$60$^\circ$, and operates at 850 nm wavelength with 70% focusing efficiency. The camera exhibits nearly diffraction-limited image quality, which indicates the potential of this technology in the development of optical systems for microscopy, photography, and computer vision.