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Updated: Jun 30, 2026

Lensfree On-chip Tomographic Microscopy Employing Multi-angle Illumination and Pixel Super-resolution
Published on: August 16, 2012
Miniature optical planar camera based on a wide-angle metasurface doublet corrected for monochromatic aberrations
Amir Arbabi1, Ehsan Arbabi1, Seyedeh Mahsa Kamali1
1T.J. Watson Laboratory of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.
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° × 60°, 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.

