Engineered metasurfaces replace adhesive tape in specialized microscopeThe latest advance in a new t

Engineered metasurfaces replace adhesive tape in specialized microscopeThe latest advance in a new type of optics aimed at improving microscopy started with a game of tennis three years ago.Unwinding after a long day of research in their respective labs, Mooseok Jang (Ph.D. ‘16) and Yu Horie (who will receive his Ph.D. in June 2018)—at the time, both graduate students at Caltech—met up for a game of tennis at Caltech’s Braun Athletic Center courts.Jang, a student of Changhuei Yang—the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science—had been working on a nascent microscopy technology that uses light scattering to circumvent the traditional tradeoff between resolution (the amount of detail you capture) and field of view (the area you capture). The research had hit a roadblock: the tools that were being used to scatter light were difficult to predict and unreliable.During the tennis match, Jang described this frustrating conundrum to Horie, a student of Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science Andrei Faraon (BS '04). In Faraon’s lab, Horie worked on metasurfaces, which are sheets of material whose electromagnetic properties can be altered on demand. Faraon, a nanophotonics engineer, creates metasurfaces that are studded with nanoscale posts made of silicon nitride. These nanoposts are capable of manipulating light with a high degree of precision—for example, to bend light like a lens does or encode holograms on a flat surface. As their conversation migrated from the tennis courts to coffee at the Red Door Marketplace at Caltech, Jang and Horie realized that the expertise of their respective labs could be combined to create a more reliable, predictable light-scattering material.Read more. -- source link

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