Engineers and astronomers at the University of Utah have designed a unique new kind of telescope lens: a flat lens with microscopic etchings to refract light. If the concept can be scaled up, these lenses could one day replace the heavier, bulkier lenses and mirrors typically used in telescopes, particularly those of professional observatories on the ground and in space. Down the line, they could also be implemented on amateur telescopes, the team says.
"Our computational techniques suggested we could design multi-level diffractive flat lenses with large apertures that could focus light across the visible spectrum," Rajesh Menon, a Utah professor of engineering, said in a statement.
