PHYSICAL SCIENCES INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase II: HR001119S0035-24

Description

Metalenses, with their ability to arbitrarily control the amplitude and phase of light across a band of wavelengths, have the potential to disrupt imaging and communication systems which rely on traditional lenses to focus, collimate, and otherwise manipulate optical signals, and are under increasing pressure to operate with reduced size and weight with high performance over a large optical bandwidth. We propose to design, develop, and demonstrate an aberration-correcting topologically optimized metasurface (ATOM) that can reduce the number of optical elements in an imaging system, contributing to a significant savings in size and weight. The metasurface will be part of a broadband (400-700 nm) f/2 imaging system that can be fabricated in sizes up to 100 mm diameter. Our approach to producing such a low size-weight and power (SWaP) optical system will utilize an aberration correcting metasurface hybridized with conventional lenses to reduce the focusing power demanded of the metasurface, use topological optimization to generate a library of meta-elements for the metasurface, and utilize scalable lithography to reduce the cost of the metacorrector when produced at large volumes.