Skip to main content

Lenses in future smartphones could be over 80 times thinner than human hair

The lenses inside the next generation of smartphones could be thinner than a strand of human hair. A team of researchers from Caltech and Samsung recently successfully created a flat lens that can be stacked on top of a digital sensor to create a tiny camera combo.

A traditional camera lens focuses the image by redirecting the light with multiple pieces of glass — a lens’ concave shape allows the light to pass through the thick middle faster than the thinner edges. Passing the light through several pieces of glass at varying distances to the other pieces in the set creates an in-focus image.

Recommended Videos

Instead of using glass, the researchers instead used two sheets of silicon cylinders. These collections of cylinders, called a metasurface, can be adjusted so that the diameter of each cylinder varies. By altering the diameter of the cylinders, the researchers were able to adjust the way the light passed through the lens to focus the image with one sheet, instead of multiple pieces of glass.

Each cylinder is 600 nanometers tall — which would make each double sheet lens about 1,200 nanometers thick. By comparison, a single strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers. Each cylinder’s diameter is adjustable, still in the hundreds of nanometers size, allowing the thin sheet to do the focal work of several pieces of glass.

The new lens (left) fixes the blur issue from earlier attempts at using the material (right). Caltech

The team isn’t the first to use a similar material to attempt to focus light for photographs, but earlier attempts resulted in an image that was blurred around the lenses. The group from Caltech and Samsung instead layered two of the sheets of silicon cylinders together, eliminating that blur, at least from a 70-degree angle of view.

“Metasurfaces like these can be easily mass produced, much the way computer chips are. That means this could be a cheap and easily scalable way to create tiny lenses just a few millimeters in diameter,” said Caltech postdoctoral researcher Amir Arbabi, who also worked with Andrei Faraon, a Caltech assistant professor of applied physics and material science, and Seunghoon Han, from Samsung Electronics.

The flat lenses could be easily added to a SMOS digital imaging sensor, the researchers say, because the lenses are developed using similar materials and techniques. Stacking the flat lenses with a sensor could make the technology viable for adding small cameras to consumer technology, such as smartphones and wearables, as well as scientific uses, including endoscopic cameras.

The research team’s next goal is to expand the lenses capability by experimenting with adding the lenses to small cameras and microscopes.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Phone cameras are so good, they’ve finally replaced my camera for work
Close up of the camera on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro.

For almost two decades, I’ve carried more than twenty pounds of electronics in my backpack for the slightest chance of needing to capture content for my professional life. My backpack usually contained my MacBook, a full-frame camera with a big lens, a tripod, and an assortment of video and audio gear that I always deemed essential.

As it turns out, over the past two years, many of these items were rendered obsolete, as many companies launched new products that were quickly able to replace technology that I previously considered irreplaceable.

Read more
This is what happens ‘when you get two uber-geeks in space at the same time’
NASA's Don Pettit on the space station.



During NASA’s first-ever Twitch livestream from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, current station inhabitant Don Pettit and recent returnee Matthew Dominick talked about what it’s like to live and work in a satellite 250 miles up.

Read more
The GoPro Hero 13 Creator Edition is $100 off, but not for long
A person holding the GoPro HERO13 Creator Edition in front of the ocean.

Outdoor enthusiasts who want to buy a new action camera should go for the brand that popularized the product and look for GoPro deals. Best Buy has an offer that's going to be hard to refuse, as it features the GoPro Hero 13 Creator Edition. From its original price of $600, it's down to just $500 as part of the retailer's Presidents' Day Sale. There are still a few days remaining before the $100 discount ends on February 17, but we highly recommend completing your purchase as soon as possible because stocks may run out before then.

Why you should buy the GoPro Hero 13 Creator Edition
The star of the GoPro Hero 13 Creator Edition is the GoPro Hero 13 Black, which is the latest version of the brand's popular line of action cameras. It's capable of recording video at up to 5.3K resolution, and you can grab photos of up to 24.7MP from your footage using the GoPro Quick app. The GoPro Hero 13 Black can also take videos that are slowed down by 13 times the normal speed, and it can last more than 5 hours on a single charge. The front and rear LCD screens will let you frame your shots perfectly, and the built-in buttons enable easy controls for lengthy sessions.

Read more