Related papers: Why optics needs thickness
Here the role and influence of aberrations in optical imaging systems employing partially coherent complex scalar fields is studied. Imaging systems require aberrations to yield contrast in the output image. For linear shift-invariant…
Optical absorbers find uses in a wide array of applications across the electromagnetic spectrum, including photovoltaic and photochemical cells, photodetectors, optical filters, stealth technology, and thermal light sources. Recent efforts…
Optical contrast is the most common preliminary method to identify layer number of two-dimensional (2D) materials, but is seldom used as a confirmatory technique. We explain the reason for variation of optical contrast between imaging…
In some super-resolution techniques, adjacent points are illuminated at different times. Thereby, their locations and light intensities can be detected even if the images are very blurred due to diffraction. According to conventional…
Conventional microscope objective lenses are diffraction limited, which means that they cannot resolve features smaller than half the illumination wavelength. Under white light illumination, such resolution limit is about 250-300 nm for an…
In a previous article we suggested a method to overcome the diffraction limit behind a telescope. We refer to theory and recent numerical simulations, and test whether it is indeed possible to use photon amplification to enhance the angular…
The concept of the diffraction limit put forth by Ernst Abbe and others has been an important guiding principle limiting our ability to tightly focus classical waves, such as light and sound, in the far field. In the past decade, numerous…
When the thickness of the layer is smaller than the electrons mean free path, the morphology affects the conductivity directly based on the layer thickness. This issue provides basis in order to estimate the thickness of the layer by…
We summarized the room-temperature optical properties for infrared-transparent materials, defining transparency windows for two different applications: thin-film coatings (absorption coefficient $\alpha < 10 cm^{-1}$) and windows ($\alpha <…
Original realization of a lens capable to transmit images with sub-wavelength resolution is proposed. The lens is formed by parallel conducting wires and effectively operates as a telegraph: it captures image at the front interface and the…
Sub-wavelength diffractive optics meta-optics present a multi-scale optical system, where the behavior of constituent sub-wavelength scatterers, or meta-atoms, need to be modelled by full-wave electromagnetic simulations, whereas the whole…
Lenses with dynamic focal length, also called zoom functionality, enable a variety of applications related to imaging and sensing. The traditional approach of stacking refractive lenses to achieve this functionality results in an expensive,…
Reducing device volume is one of the key requirements for advanced nanophotonic technologies, however this demand is often at odds with designing highly absorbing elements which usually require sizeable thicknesses, such as for detector and…
We study the possibility of creating spatial patterns having subwavelength size by using the so-called dark states formed by the interaction between atoms and optical fields. These optical fields have a specified spatial distribution. Our…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
Two transformation-optics inspired flat lenses are used to build up an optical system capable to transpose an area surrounding the object focal point in a magnified area surrounding the image focal point. The object and image focal points…
There has been a resurgence of interest in optical computing over the past decade, both in academia and in industry, with much of the excitement centered around special-purpose optical computers for neural-network processing. Optical…
Cassegrain designs can be used to build thin lenses. We analyze the relationships between system thickness and aperture sizes of the two mirrors as well as FoV size. Our analysis shows that decrease in lens thickness imposes tight…
Traditional optical imaging faces an unavoidable trade-off between resolution and depth of field (DOF). To increase resolution, high numerical apertures (NA) are needed, but the associated large angular uncertainty results in a limited…
We describe and experimentally validate an algorithm to reconstruct an unknown extended object from through-focus measured image intensities blurred by unknown aberrations. It is shown that the method can recover diffraction-limited image…