AI Article Synopsis

  • - LWIR cameras are vital for various applications but require advanced lens designs that are broad in bandwidth, lightweight, compact, and cost-effective due to high-performance demands.
  • - The proposed method utilizes inverse design for LWIR hybrid metalenses, focusing on correcting aberrations while achieving a large field of view (30°) and a broad bandwidth (8 to 14 μm) for thermal imaging.
  • - This innovative design significantly improves upon existing technologies by offering enhanced field of view, efficiency, and a remarkably compact optical path length of just 13.6 mm, enabling more effective imaging and sensing applications.

Article Abstract

Long wave infrared (LWIR) cameras play a pivotal role across diverse applications due to their distinctive features. The growing demand for high-performance thermal imaging optics, characterized by a broad working bandwidth, large field of view (FOV), aberration-free design, lightweight construction, compactness, and cost-effectiveness, poses significant challenges for LWIR lens design. Here, we propose an inverse design method for LWIR hybrid metalenses, specifically aiming to achieve aberration-corrected thermal imaging with both a large FOV and a broad working bandwidth. Our approach involves optimizing phase profiles of metalens' unit cells guided by a loss function that compares the hybrid lens design to diffraction-limited results for various incident angles and wavelengths. As a result, we demonstrate an aberration-corrected thermal camera with a 30° FOV and an achromatic working bandwidth spanning the entire LWIR atmospheric window (8 to 14 μm). Significantly, the total optical path length, the entrance pupil to the sensor plane of the charge-coupled device (CCD), is a mere 13.6 mm. Our work merits advantages in the FOV, working bandwidth, and compactness, which surpass state-of-the-art LWIR hybrid metalens designs and find numerous imaging and sensing applications.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.4c12546DOI Listing

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