Review for optical metalens based on metasurfaces: fabrication and applications
PMC12540773
· 10.1038/s41378-025-01064-5
Gap Declaration
The manufacturing section covers various methods such as masked lithography, maskless lithography, and additive manufacturing, and further discussed in detail about their applicable scenarios and limitations. In terms of application, metalenses can be used in non-imaging optics to shape the beam, enhance illumination efficiency and energy conversion efficiency; while in imaging optics, they have significant applications in fields such as lithography, astronomical observation, microscopes, and endoscopes. We also emphasized the issues that metalenses need to overcome in commercial applications, such as environmental adaptability, design and evaluation methods, and proposed future research directions, including the development of new design methods and the integration with artificial intelligence technology. Overall, metalenses, with their unique optical control capabilities and compatibility with semiconductor manufacturing, are expected to become a key factor driving the development of the next generation of optical systems.
Abstract
Metalens is the next generation of optical metasurfaces for compact imaging, sensing, and display applications that allow the phase, polarization, frequency, amplitude, angular momentum, etc. of the incident light to be designed with high degrees of freedom to meet the application requirements, which has attracted broad interest in the field of planar optics. One significant challenge in implementing applications for metalens is the efficient fabrication of large-scale nanostructures with high resolution, robustness and uniform patterning. In this review, we first introduced the manufacturing techniques compatible with metasurfaces fabrication in detail, including masked lithography, maskless lithography, and additive manufacturing, discussed the limitations and provided some insights. Nex…
Conclusions / Discussion
Future outlook and conclusion The challenges of commercialization As the third-generation optical lens element, metalens shows a good development prospect because of its sub-wavelength thickness and ultra-light characteristics and arbitrary parameter control of optical wavefront. Many companies have developed various applications based on its advantages: Metalenz and STMicroelectronics teamed up to deliver a next-generation FlightSense™ time-of-flight (ToF) ranging sensor, the VL53L8 (https://metalenz.com/metalenz-and-stmicroelectronics-deliver-worlds-first-optical-metasurface-technology-for-consumer-electronics-devices), Canon demonstrated metalens technology at its Expo (https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20231019-2796140), MetalenX released the world’s first wide-spectrum visible light aberration-free meta-hybrid optical system prototype lens (https://www.metalenx.com/xinwenzhongxin/274.html), Leadoptik has collaborated with Stanford Medicine on research aimed at promoting the application and development of AI-enhanced real-time optical imaging technology in the field of lung cancer biopsy (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stanford-medicine-and-leadoptik-announce-research-co…
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