(ORDO NEWS) — The image of the Moon in the second image may not seem all that impressive, but it is absolutely amazing from a technical standpoint.
What makes the picture so unique is that it was taken with a telescope using a completely flat lens.
This type of lens, called metal lenses, has been around for a while, but a team of researchers at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) recently made the largest ever.
At eight centimeters in diameter, it was large enough to be used in a real telescope , resulting in the above image of the Moon.
Metal lenses have been produced before, but usually only in the millimeter scale.
They use nanostructures etched into the surface of the lens itself, causing light passing through them to focus at a central focal point, similar to the curved surface of a typical lens used in optics.
One of the reasons why other metal lenses have so far been relatively small in scale is the difficulty of creating these nanostructures on a larger lens structure.
To do this, the PSU team used an alternative manufacturing process called deep ultraviolet (DUV) photolithography.
It is commonly used to create high-speed computer chips. Compared to the conventional metal lens process of cathode beam lithography, DUV has several advantages.
First, this process is repeated at high speed. A team led by Dr. Xingjie Ni managed to cover the surface of a 4 cm diameter circle with nanostructured antennas – and break it down into manageable pieces.
These fragments turned out to be 22 x 22 mm wafer areas, and they then applied the required antenna structures to the lens using Cornell’s DUV system.
The second advantage is that DUV is capable of consistently reproducing fine details.
This process is used to make transistors on a computer chip, but in this case, nanostructured antennas can be made with the same level of precision.
Astronomy is not the only practical application of these large metal lenses. Despite their ubiquity, cell phone camera lenses are still curved.
Usually on the thinnest cell phone models, you can see the protrusion next to the camera lens.
With a real metal lens that works as intended, these issues can be eliminated, resulting in a vast install base if mobile phone manufacturers are interested.
Both amateur and professional astronomers are likely to be able to get much better pictures of the moon as well.
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