Researchers at Princeton have developed an imaging method that could lead to lenses which show all parts of the scene at once in the same high detail.
This new method could help build stronger microscopes and other optical devices and will allow the user to take a closer look at an object without narrowing the field of view.
As we know, cameras and other optical devices including the human eye are restricted by the amount of light that they can collect through their lens openings or apertures.
Hence, to record a light ray, it has to pass through the lens and reach the device’s detector like the eye’s retina or a digital camera’s detector. But many light rays cannot reach the detector because they are very weak or because they are deflected.
Each color of light has a distinct wavelength. For example the color of green, has a wavelength of 530 nanometers, which is approximately the size of a typical bacterium’s internal structure) Light rays from such tiny features fade before they reach the lens.
In order to capture these rays, devices have to probe very near the surface of the object, and scrutinize it point-by-point, edging together a full image.
The new method addresses the shortcomings of small apertures by taking advantage of the unusual properties of substances called nonlinear optical materials. In conventional lens materials such as glass or plastic, rays of light pass through without interacting with one another.
In non-linear materials, light rays mix with each other in complex ways. Rays that don’t reach the camera may pass along some of their information to rays that do get recorded by it. Due to the mixing of rays, information that would otherwise be lost manages to reach the camera.
The image from a nonlinear lens would therefore be rich in detail. Unfortunately, it would also be distorted — and useless for conventional optics. But if the information could be unscrambled, a computer could reconstruct a high-resolution undistorted image of the entire scene.
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