Thin, simple diffractive lenses are notorious for their blurry images, so they have never been used in astronomical observatories. But if you could improve their clarity, using diffractive lenses ...

In recent years, the world of optics has undergone a major shift. New research shows how light can be bent, focused, and even changed in color using structures so small they’re invisible to the eye.

Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of the solar system to date. The grand question is whether any of these planets are home to life. To find the answer, astronomers will ...

A new type of flat, ultrathin lens designed to be free of chromatic aberrations has been developed by researchers in the US. The device has a variety of potential applications, from ultralight imaging ...

A team of physicists at ETH Zurich has created a tiny metalens that can half the wavelength of incident light. They have achieved this using a special metal-oxide lens material called lithium niobate ...

Paper-thin optical lenses simple enough to mass produce like microchips could enable a new generation of compact optical devices. Researchers have fabricated and tested flat lenses called Fresnel zone ...

Engineers at the University of Utah have developed a new method of creating optics which are flat and ultra-thin, yet can still bend light to a single point like traditional lenses. It's hoped the ...

From evening drives to navigating a house or a park in the dark, there are so many situations where it'd be handy to slip on a simple pair of night-vision lenses and the world that's beyond human ...

Lenses are no longer necessary for some microscopes, according to Rice University engineers developing FlatScope, a thin fluorescent microscope whose abilities promise to surpass those of old-school ...

Caltech engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it ...

Engineers have built a camera that does not need lenses to focus light. It can switch from a fish-eye to a telephoto lens instantaneously. Traditional cameras -- even those on the thinnest of cell ...