Andrei Faraon at California Institute of Technology's Nanoscale and Quantum Optics Lab creates new lenses.
The word "lens" takes its name from the Latin word for lentil. Both are both hemispheric shapes bound together on their flat surface. So a "flat lens" sounds like a contradiction of terms. Yet that is exactly what Andrei Faraon is working on at California Institute of Technology's Nanoscale and Quantum Optics Lab.
Why flat lenses? They could be used in lots of places where conventional optical lenses are too bulky, Faraon, a member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech, explained. Built onto semiconductor sensors, surgeons could attach them to guide surgical tools and researchers could use them in microscopes designed to look at transparent objects inside cells. [Read the Kavli Foundation story]