Jim Watkins is leading an initiative, with materials partner Pixelligent and Nano-optical and x-ray components manufacturer Moxtek, to advance scalable manufacturing processes that enable commercial fabrication of highly refractive metalenses, which could allow these high-performing optical wafers to be widely used in next-generation smartphone cameras, medical imaging devices, and more.
The project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Promising results by the UMass team were recently published in the journal ACS Photonics.