Spectral tomographic imaging with aplanatic metalens

Chen Chen; Wange Song; Jia-Wern Chen; Jung-Hsi Wang; Yu Han Chen; Beibei Xu; Mu-Ku Chen; Hanmeng Li; Bin Fang; Ji Chen; Hsin Yu Kuo; Shuming Wang; Din Ping Tsai; Shining Zhu; Tao Li

doi:10.1038/s41377-019-0208-0

Spectral tomographic imaging with aplanatic metalens

Light Sci Appl. 2019 Nov 6:8:99. doi: 10.1038/s41377-019-0208-0. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Chen Chen^{1

2}, Wange Song^{1

2}, Jia-Wern Chen^{3

4}, Jung-Hsi Wang⁵, Yu Han Chen^{3

4}, Beibei Xu^{1

2}, Mu-Ku Chen^{3

4}, Hanmeng Li^{1

2}, Bin Fang^{1

2}, Ji Chen^{1

2}, Hsin Yu Kuo^{3

4}, Shuming Wang^{1

2}, Din Ping Tsai^{3

4}, Shining Zhu^{1

2}, Tao Li^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ 1National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Optical Sensing and Integration, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093 China.
² 2Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing, China.
³ Research Center for Applied Sciences, Taipei, 11529 Taiwan, China.
⁴ Department of Physics, Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617 Taiwan, China.
⁵ Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617 Taiwan, China.

Abstract

Tomography is an informative imaging modality that is usually implemented by mechanical scanning, owing to the limited depth-of-field (DOF) in conventional systems. However, recent imaging systems are working towards more compact and stable architectures; therefore, developing nonmotion tomography is highly desirable. Here, we propose a metalens-based spectral imaging system with an aplanatic GaN metalens (NA = 0.78), in which large chromatic dispersion is used to access spectral focus tuning and optical zooming in the visible spectrum. After the function of wavelength-switched tomography was confirmed on cascaded samples, this aplanatic metalens is utilized to image microscopic frog egg cells and shows excellent tomographic images with distinct DOF features of the cell membrane and nucleus. Our approach makes good use of the large diffractive dispersion of the metalens and develops a new imaging technique that advances recent informative optical devices.

Keywords: Imaging and sensing; Metamaterials.