The word "lens" takes its name from the Latin word for lentil. Both are both hemispheric shapes bound together on their flat surface. So a "flat lens" sounds like a contradiction of terms. Yet that is exactly what Andrei Faraon is working on at California Institute of Technology's Nanoscale and Quantum Optics Lab.

These satellites can be tracked using three different live sites and apps that use live maps to show where different satellites are in real time called Find Starlink and SatelliteMap.Space and James.Darpinian. None of the sites say they are affiliated with SpaceX, Starlink or Elon Musk.

The Kavli Foundation was established in 2000 by Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-American entrepreneur and champion of science, with a vision to advance science for the benefit of humanity.

Line of lightsin the sky tonight

Faraon thought he had a clear solution: Build a flat lens using the same techniques used to fabricate silicon semiconductor image sensors so that the lens and sensor form a small, single integrated system.

Line of lightsin the sky tonight 2024

That makes them ideal for surgical instruments like endoscopes. These are long, thin rods with cameras and LED lights at the end, which doctors insert into body cavities and organs to perform minimally invasive surgery.

Another possible use lies in differential phase contrast imaging, a technique often used to look at transparent objects, like cells, organelles inside cells, and crystals. It uses very small differences in the speed at which light, usually from an LED, passes these objects to enhance the edge of the sample.

Line ofstars in the sky tonight

Finally, in today's digital world, engineers must couple those lenses with a separate image sensor, which makes them even bulkier and more costly.

"If you know what to do, it's a simple to design compared with the design that goes into a computer processor," Faraon said.

(WJET/WFXP/YourErie.com) — If you looked up into the sky Friday night, there’s a chance you may have seen what looked like a chain of dots that didn’t quite seem like a normal constellation or shooting star.

When they’re launched, the satellites create a train of light on their way into orbit and fly at just the right height to be functional while the sun shines on them. This combined with how low in orbit they are, the lights can be easily seen from the ground without the aid of a telescope or binoculars.

These satellites fly closer to Earth than most other satellites and were first launched in 2019. Currently, there are more than 3,000 of these low-orbiting satellites used to supply broadband internet to Starlink customers all over the world.

Stringof lightsin the sky

There are several reasons conventional optical lenses fall short for these and other applications. Those lenses work by bending light, so it focuses on a single point in the center. Yet the curves used to gather light make conventional lenses expensive to manufacture. They also distort colors and produce less sharp images on their edges. To correct for those flaws, optical systems use additional lenses, which makes them bulky and more expensive.

Through careful calculations, Faraon's team designed an array of pillars that brought all light together on top of a flat image sensor like those used in smartphones and digital cameras.

Surprisingly, this is not a deal breaker. After all, lasers and LED lights also emit only a single wavelength of light. So, any application that uses a laser or LED to illuminate something could use a flat lens to gather light reflected from that object.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The lenses should also be easy to mass produce at reasonable cost, since they are made by the same silicon semiconductor technology used to make conventional image sensors.

Line of lightsin the sky 2023

The Kavli Foundation identifies potentially transformative ideas and catalyzes opportunities that unlock the benefits of science to create lasting impact for science and society.

That's what metasurfaces do. They are surfaces made of conventional materials--in this case, silicon--shaped into nanosized structures that alter how those materials respond to light. The most famous example of an optical metamaterial is a cloak developed at Duke University that bends light and makes objects appear invisible.

Why flat lenses? They could be used in lots of places where conventional optical lenses are too bulky, Faraon, a member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech, explained. Built onto semiconductor sensors, surgeons could attach them to guide surgical tools and researchers could use them in microscopes designed to look at transparent objects inside cells.

Faraon is already working on several of these applications, proving that a flat lens is not really a contradiction in terms.

The turkey is the centerpiece of holiday meals, but it’s also intimidating to cook. Follow these tips for a turkey that’s juicy, tender and perfectly cooked.

"As the light propagates through the pillars, it works like a convex lens," he said. "The pillars in the center are fatter, so they delay light slightly longer than the thinner pillars on the edge."

Faraon's metasurfaces are dotted with 600-nanometer-high silicon cylinders that alters the path and speed of light as it passes through them. (Light always moves the same speed in a vacuum, but slows down when it passes through a medium like water or silicon.)

Precooked turkeys arrive fully cooked, juicy and full of flavor, and they need only minutes in the oven instead of hours. Try one of these quality picks.

This enabled him to create a lens that gathered light from a 70-degree viewing angle and focused it crisply on a single plane. Faraon has also made flat telephoto lenses that zoom in on an image.

At first, the metasurfaces produced images that were blurry around the edges. So, Faraon's group borrowed a trick used by conventional lenses and put two metasurfaces on top of one another (with the nanopillars on the outside).

Line of lightsin the sky 2024

Yet flat lenses have one major shortcoming: they work for one wavelength of light only. If a camera with a flat lens took a picture of an outdoor scene, all that would show up on the image is a specific wavelength of red, blue, or another color.

The straight line of lights was actually SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. These very same lights could be seen over other parts of the country back in February.