On the 5th, a research team led by Professor Noh Jun-seok of the departments of mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and the Graduate School of Convergence at Pohang University of Science and Technology POSTECH said it developed a single-layer metalens that achieves an ultrawide field of view close to 180 degrees while being compatible with existing camera systems.
Competition is fierce to build smaller, lighter cameras for smartphones, drones, and self-driving cars. In particular, an "ultrawide-angle lens" that can capture a wider scene at once is considered a core technology in commercial imaging systems. However, conventional lenses require stacking multiple glass or plastic elements, making them bulky and heavy, and they also suffer from color fringing and defocus.
To overcome these limitations, scientists have focused on "metalenses," which precisely control light with hundreds of thousands of tiny nanostructures. Instead of stacking multiple elements, they designed a "quadratic phase profile" within a single metalens to finely control the flow of light. Thanks to this design, a single-layer metalens enabled ultrawide hemispherical imaging with a field of view of about 176 degrees.
The research team actually fabricated this metalens using advanced nanofabrication processes. In experiments, at visible wavelengths of red (635 nm), green (532 nm), and blue (450 nm), the metalens showed excellent performance, accurately focusing even at incident angles up to 88 degrees. Like a conventional camera, it produced clear images without distortion while receiving light of various colors.
Another outcome of this study is that the metalens is compatible with the color filters used in existing cameras. This greatly lowers the barrier to commercialization, meaning it can be readily applied to existing products such as smartphones and drones.
Professor Noh said, "This study presents a new direction that simplifies complex optical systems while maintaining high performance," and added, "It could be applied to a wide range of fields, including wearable cameras, optical sensors for self-driving cars, and ultra-small medical endoscopes."
The results were published in September in Laser & Photonics Reviews, a prestigious journal in optics and photonics.
References
Laser & Photonics Reviews (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/lpor.202500098