Summary

Traditional lenses and mirrors focus light using curved surfaces. Metasurfaces can achieve similar functions with a flat layer of nanoscale structures that locally control the phase of light. Extending these flat optics into the ultraviolet could support compact systems for high-resolution imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing, but it introduces a fundamental materials problem: many of the materials used to make metasurfaces strongly absorb UV light. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed an alternative approach that turns this limitation on its head.

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