Graphene Optical Lens a Billionth of a Meter Thick Breaks the Diffraction Limit (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: With the development of photonic chips and nano-optics, the old ground glass lenses can't keep up in the race toward miniaturization. In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the Swinburne University of Technology has developed a graphene microlens one billionth of a meter thick that can take sharper images of objects the size of a single bacterium and opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers.

Comments

Adm. Grace

[Anonymous Coward]

Wants her pico back!

Re: Adm. Grace

[Anonymous Coward]

What the he'll is a "metre"?

Re: Adm. Grace

[pruedz]

<quote><p>What the he'll is a "metre"?</p></quote>

Is what the entire world use for the word that Americans spell "meter" for some reason.

Breaks the Diffraction Limit...

[Anonymous Coward]

they better get some superglue and put it back together before someone finds out.

Re: Breaks the Diffraction Limit...

[Thud457]

Yeah, but can it do the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs?

Re: Breaks the Diffraction Limit...

[Livius]

It does the Kessel run in under 12 nanometres!

Which is probably less than 12 parsecs.

Graphene

[rmdingler]

FTA: "Once the technology is mature, the team sees it as having applications beyond microscopy, such as in lighter, thinner mobile phones with thermal imaging capabilities, smaller endoscopes for surgery, as a replacement for conventional lenses in nanosatellites to save a couple of hundred grams..."

This material seems to be the latest addition to Randall Munroe's long list of engineering problems that can be waved away by tacking on the prefix "nano-."

Re:Graphene

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA?

Re:Graphene

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA?

I think he meant Fuck The Article,

Camera Pills getting small

[justcauseisjustthat]

This would be huge for camera pills and colonoscopy cameras, imagine swallowing 3-6 camera pills (no bigger that a standard capsule pill) of these and they stream back a continue set of pictures as they travel from the mouth until they pass through the butt. This would be the shit!!!

Re: Camera Pills getting small

[Anonymous Coward]

"Huge" -- I see what you did there.

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[PPH]

imagine

I'm having breakfast right now.

Bon appétit!

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your Colon" - the reality show: see the ups and downs of the intestinal track, observe the valleys and peaks. Glimpses of the Intestinal villus only at the pay-per-view.

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fact, it would be fantastic if they could eliminate the need to pump your colon full of air and stick a big robotic snake up there, while still maintaining the same or better coverage as a traditional colonoscopy.

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[Anonymous Coward]

> Bon appÃf©tit!

Looks like you got one of those used camera pills in your breakfast!

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[PPH]

Unicode gives Slashdot IBS.

Re:Camera Pills getting small

[justcauseisjustthat]

Totally agree, although I was being comical, I was also serious. As an individual who is required to have a colonoscopy every 2 yrs, this would be nice alternative. Also the smaller size would translate to less chance of the pills getting stuck in the small or large intestine, hopefully.

Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

People really ought to know by now that the word "billion" is ambiguous.
We have a perfectly good set of unambiguous SI prefixes.

Re:Billionth

[Person147]

Meh, I think even us Brits have accepted the American definition by now.

Re:Billionth

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The BBC News threw in the towel over billion a quarter of a century ago. I was watching live.

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

The British Government officially adopted the "short" billion in 1976 for all government statistical reporting. So that battle is long over. And no amount of colourful language or attempts to honour the history of "billion" will have any effect....

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

Just be thankful that they used metres, even if they couldn;t spell it correctly!

Re:Billionth

[jellomizer]

You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields.
That will get rid of any cultural confusion.

Re:Billionth

[Joce640k]

The British Government officially adopted the "short" billion in 1976 for all government statistical reporting. So that battle is long over.

So the two countries that clung to feet/pints/bushels/furlongs the longest have decided to agree.

And have both agreed to something the rest of the world doesn't recognize.

Fail.

Re:Billionth

[jenningsthecat]

You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields. That will get rid of any cultural confusion.

Not if you're Canadian, you insensitive clod! :) Our football fields are 110 yards long, so for us it's 9.9418^(-12) football fields. Then there are soccer-type 'football fields'...

Re:Billionth

[Locke2005]

Kind sir, I believe you misspelled "colorful" and "honor"! Carry on...

Re:Billionth

[codeAlDente]

Everything's bigger in Texas my ass!

Re:Billionth

[Platinumrat]

correct. "I laugh at bigger than Texas" and politely point out to Texans, that I come from a country where only two states are smaller than Texas

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

All the English speaking countries use a short Billion.

If another language uses a word that looks like "billion" to mean something else - that doesn't make English "Billion" wrong, it just means you need to translate it - you translate the rest of the sentence, so I don't see why translating that word is hard.

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

Texans then counter that nobody cares about your shit-hole country.

Re:Billionth

[codeAlDente]

The number of countries that have been invaded by Texans (who do care, really, let's be honest) is bigger than Texas.

Re:Billionth

[Darinbob]

Yes, "billion" is such a bilious word.

Re:Billionth

[Darinbob]

Still waiting for England to officially acknowledge that it is not the ultimate arbiter of the English language. After all what they're insisting is the standard is what was the upper class elite use of the language, whereas in America we standardized on the common usage. And they forget that spelling actually changed in England after the American revolution. Never mind that language is fluid and evolves, trying to halt that evolution is futile.

(And really really annoyed with all my Australian coworkers who feel the need to say "what language were you speaking, it's unintelligble?" every time I say "aluminum" or the like.)

Re:Billionth

[Darinbob]

The standardization of English spelling occured after the American colonies were well established. What was originally used in the colonies was the common usage of the day. There were multiple allowed spelling options, and Webster chose those common options that were simplified and more uniform and more logical. "Color" is used in some Shakespeare. Johnson's dictionary in England preferred "-our" suffix rather than make a distinction between Latin or French original, whereas Webster went the other way and used "-or" regardless of etymology. Johnson was somewhat predisposed to the Old French style anyway, which had little to do with how the common person spelled or thought. Most of Webster's original reformed spellings were rejected anyway. Any changes in spelling in England were not adopted in America. Other English colonies that did not break away so soon did adopt the English changes as they continued to use textbooks published in England.

Anyway, insisting on only one spelling is stupid, whether it is from language fascists trying to halt evolution, or someone who insists "potatoe" is the only correct answer versus those who were equally wrong in insisting "potato" is the only valid one. Language changes, deal with it.

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind that language is fluid and evolves, trying to halt that evolution is futile.

Which is why the British government switched their usage, keeping in sync with common usage, and making it quite clear they are not the arbiter of the language.

Re: Billionth

[Diamon]

Thanks a milliard for the update.

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

England is the ultimate arbiter of the language we speak in England, which is called English. What you refer to as "the English language" doesn't actually exist, so nobody is arbiter of it. You're not exactly clear on which words or phrases are "upper class elite" compared to good old "common usage". English has a long and fascinating history, only a few hundreds years of which involve the American dialect at all. Many English words derive from the fashion in the 1100s to mimic French, for instance, so whatever happened since the American Revolution might well be all that matters to you, but it is but a small window on the history of the overall language to me.

BTW, we're not the country whose own chemical society insists on using a non-internationally-standard spelling for the element Al. It's "ALUMINIUM" according to everybody except the ACS.

Re:Billionth

[cjb110]

Since 1974 in fact, when Parliament decided the US's crappy definition was too prevalent, and decided to adopt it for all official documents.

Re:Billionth

[JakartaDean]

Anyway, insisting on only one spelling is stupid, whether it is from language fascists trying to halt evolution, or someone who insists "potatoe" is the only correct answer versus those who were equally wrong in insisting "potato" is the only valid one. Language changes, deal with it.

I respectfully disagree. English spelling is already a nightmare for children and newcomers learning the language; allowing different people to spell the same word however they liked would only make it worse. Personally, I think we should simplify the spelling on all words using standard phonetics, and just have a cut-off date for transition, after which "old English spelling" would only be an academic option for those interested in transcribing older works.

There is evidence that children in English-speaking countries learn at a slower rate than their peers with a more logical and consistent spelling.

Re:Billionth

[JakartaDean]

Never mind that language is fluid and evolves, trying to halt that evolution is futile.

(And really really annoyed with all my Australian coworkers who feel the need to say "what language were you speaking, it's unintelligble?" every time I say "aluminum" or the like.)

I think that language can and must evolve, but spelling need not.

The English/Aussie spelling/pronunciation makes more sense if you look at the periodic table, but your coworkers might not have thought of that. Aussies like to take the piss...

Re:Billionth

[RockDoctor]

Johnson was somewhat predisposed to the Old French style anyway, which had little to do with how the common person spelled or thought.

At that time there was no such thing as "how the common person spelled" ; it probably wasn't until quite late in the 19th century that literacy rates even approached 50%, and as for "functional literacy" (the ability to actually read and comprehend newspaper articles and novels) it's a moot point if either side of the Atlantic has yet reached 75% functional literacy.

I was listening to a Dickens story on the radio earlier today (turgid, tedious shit, as expected ; I stopped 1/5 of the way through an tuned to something interesting instead) and I remember that he was still routinely using "shewed" well into the 1850s.

Re:Billionth

[Darinbob]

A spelling by Humphry Davy who was trying to isolate the element was "aluminum", despite being British. Earlier he had used "alumium" briefly. Later someone objected to the spelling and wanted -ium at the end.

Remember, we have platinum, molybdenum.

Anyway, I'm annoyed at the "Americans are soooo stupid!" and "Americans refuse to conform" memes, when actually checking out etymology or history doesn't confirm it.

Re: Billionth

[LinuxLuver]

True.

Re: Billionth

[LinuxLuver]

Canadian football fields are in metres, surely. Not yards.

Re: Billionth

[ceoyoyo]

He didn't mention that in Canadian football the balls are bigger too.

Re:Billionth

[uninformedLuddite]

Only when you visit Texas is that true.

Re:Billionth

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not wrong, but it is bad. English people, when given a choice between something that is rational, makes sense, and it is a default used by the rest of the world, and one thing that conceptually doesn't make any sense, is not easy to use, and will open the door to plenty of serious problems due to miscommunication or human error, will always choose the latter. English is like Internet Explorer 5, breaking standards on purpose, and forcing the rest of the world to deal with their shitty exceptions everyday and making our lives a more miserable simply because Microsoft was too lazy to fix it.

SI units

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm

Re:SI units

[NEDHead]

I prefer to use centimeters. Can you please convert this for me?

Re:SI units

[Rob Bos]

Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh

Re:SI units

[OzPeter]

Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh

Regardless of TIMMAY!!! TFA does use "billionth"

Re:SI units

[wkwilley2]

It's for dramatic effect.

A Billionth of a meter sounds way more intense than 1 nanometer IMO.

Re:SI units

[OzPeter]

Forgot to mention, the Swinburne source material uses both "billionth" and "nm", however the Nature article only uses "nm"

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

0.00001 cm

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mrs. once went to the emergency room for a cut and was attended by two physician's assistants:

Assistant #1: "I need the length of the wound in millimeters."
Assistant #2: "But this ruler is marked in centimeters!"

Yep. I'm a 'murican.

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it really matter if you can't understand?

I understand nanometre as incoherently small. Just as I understand a light year to be incoherently large.

0.1nm = 1nm = 10nm, to a layman, so no reason not to use the technical term.

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm

Dull surprise when you realize you also have to account for people picturing Long Scale billions/billionths versus this article's implied short scale ones. How did mathematicians, of all stiff people, ever let something like this sillyness happen to our numbers and scales? Was it ye olde overwhelming vernacular use problem that we see choking standard language decade by decade?

Re:SI units

[Noah Haders]

Ikr? Why not just say nanometer? Everybody knows what that means.

Re:SI units

[thegarbz]

One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm

I thought a nanometer was one US quadrillionth of a megameter.

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a billionth of a meter or a nautical mile? I'm so confused...

Re:SI units

[yodleboy]

yeah, but how many Library of Congress shelves is this? I don't think I can process this metric fad.

Re:SI units

[godel_56]

Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh

The original TFA was written for a general audience, many of whom probably aren't sure what "nano" is.

Re:SI units

[KGIII]

Hey now, it's not our fault. We don't get to control the language or how it is used. It was probably the grammarians or the econ-guys that did it. I'd have used nanometer.

Re:SI units

[Anonymous Coward]

They were most likely MAs not PAs, but like you said, you're a 'murican.

Re:SI units

[RockDoctor]

What were the toilet-scrubbers doing handling a patient (as opposed to their faeces)?

Re:SI units

[lucien86]

It depends. Now if you use fm, now that really is small. (10^-15 m, a naked proton across)

Use the Source .. TIMMAY!

[OzPeter]

200nm thick graphene oxide lens

Highly efficient and ultra-broadband graphene oxide ultrathin lenses with three-dimensional subwavelength focusing

Re:Use the Source .. TIMMAY!

[pcr_teacher]

Here is a reference that explains how the technology works:
http://petapixel.com/2015/02/2...

Science!

[Imazalil]

Science!!

I don't have anything else to say on the topic, it's just nice to hear about awsome stuff like this on a Monday morning. Sure, it isn't a flying car, but I'll settle for smaller colonoscopy cameras (as justcauseisjustthat points out above) just fine.

Re:Science!

[gstoddart]

Yes, yay, science ... but after many many years of "this will revolutionize the world in 5 years", many of us are just sort of numb to it.

Because it never actually seems to happen. So getting all excited about it now seems premature.

Re:Science!

[Rei]

You're typing on a device that stores trillions of pieces of data and makes billions of computations per second with the ability to grab data on almost anything from around the world in milliseconds, using electricity transmitted from hundreds of kilometers through wires on towers dozens of meters tall connected to megastructures that do things like burn coal as fast as entire trains can pull into the yard, or spin in the wind with blades the size of jumbo jets, or the like, which were delivered to their location by vehicles with computer-timed engines burning a fuel that was pumped up halfway around the world from up to half a dozen kilometers underground and locked into complex strata (through wells drilled by diamond-lined bores that can be remote-control steered as they go), shipped around the world in tankers with volumes the size of large city blocks and the height of apartment complexes, run through complex chemical processes in unimaginable quantities, distributed nationwide and sold to you at a corner store for $1.80 a gallon, which you then pay for with a little piece of microchipped plastic, if not a smartphone, which does all of the aforementioned computer stuff but in a box the size of your hand that tolerates getting beaten up in your pocket all day.

But technology never seems to advance...

Re:Science!

[Falconhell]

Quite right, we've become incredibly blasé about the tech miracles of the last 50 years.

Re:Science!

[gstoddart]

No, we have awesome technology ... but if I got excited over every hardware advancement on the front page of Slashdot which was going to completely change some common technology with 5 years ... well, I'd be living in a perpetual state of disappointment.

Technology advances ... getting breathless over all of the things which might be the next big thing, sooner or later you realize there's an awful lot of stuff which doesn't pan out.

If even a quarter of the breakthroughs in Lithium batteries we've seen on Slashdot had ever happened, I'd have a cell phone with a two month battery life.

So you'll excuse me if I've stopped getting excited about things which aren't in production yet, because the difference between a cool thing in a lab and something which is actually going to trickle down to the consumer can be significant.

Because "opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers" is a long way from being true.

So, yeah ... wonderment and awe tends to be a casualty of enough years in the tech industry. Film at 11.

Re:Science!

[omnichad]

In other words, if Earth is hit by a massive EMP, we're all screwed. We can't switch to much of a local economy any time fast.

Re:Science!

[serviscope_minor]

Also, one doesn't tend to hear much directly about super resolution microscopy (anything beating the diffration limit). Supreres is a great (if rather finicky) tool, but it will enable other descoveries by allowing people to see otherwise unobservable cellular mechanism.

Eventually you'll probably hear about the results of those, but supre-res in general and the technique in particular will probably have long since left the description by the time you hear about it.

Re:Science!

[ledow]

And you're discussing it on a medium that didn't even exist 50 years ago, in a browser that only works as expected on websites if it was made in the last 5 years, running on a computer that has to have been made in the last 10 at least to be fast enough, and the markup surrounding your post would probably fill the memory of any machine made when you were a kid (let alone the processing and display of that markup).

Tech moves fast.
Hell, we've basically ended up in a Star Trek-like universe where anyone can call anyone they know, at any time of the day, almost anywhere in the world, by tapping a button and saying "Call Fred". And we barely even noticed.

Re:Science!

[kwoff]

I hope the news footage includes you explaining in detail how unexcited you are about it. It's very interesting how unexcited you are!

Re:Science!

[thegarbz]

Yeah but what's still missing? Hoverboard!

Re:Science!

[gstoddart]

You're entirely free to ignore it.

Me, I don't much give a crap about you not giving a crap about things I don't give a crap about, but if you insist on discussing how much you don't give a crap about me not giving a crap ... well, I don't give a crap.

Like every other piece of drivel on the internet, just pretend it's not even there.

Re:Science!

[8086]

That's a wonderful passage and truly deserves to be published. I wish I was a schoolteacher just so I could show it to my kids in class. I agree with all of it: there are lots of miracles both man-made and god-made all around us that we never come to appreciate. But here's my gripe with the state of technological innovation today: all this stuff except for cellphones has been with us for decades, or at least for as long as I've had my eyes open. Sure there are minor improvements everywhere: carburetors got replaced by injectors, brick phones got replaced with Nokia 6610s which got replaced by iPhones. The Internet was a big one, but that was about 20 years ago for me. There haven't been any giant leaps in technology for as long as I can remember except for the Internet. I've been reading about nanotechnology for about 15 years now, and I know universities are all abuzz about it, but so far I haven't seen it affect my life in any meaningful way. Someone needs to come up with a way to bring all this new technology that we hear about in papers to market more quickly.

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but at this point, graphene is snake oil. Every week I see another article published about how it's the best at yet something else, yet to date not a single product produced with it. All of the things you've mentioned are things which are done and are impressive. But of the 5.32e1568 uses for graphene that seem to have been found so far, not one of them has been found to be practical. Even if it is for no other reason that nobody has figured out how to manufacture the stuff at commercial scale. If one tenth of the "discoveries" about graphene prove to be true, I'll be shocked.

Re:Science!

[GLMDesigns]

Really? Exponential increases in processing power along with a decrease in price is not affecting your life in any meaningful way? Do you want to go back to 9600 baud? And be excited when 14.4s and then 28.8 came out.

In 2000 T1s (1.54 Mb/s) cost $1000 a month and I don't know how much to install. Now 1.54 up and down is low end consumer speed.

The difference between an iPhone and a brick phone is astonishing. You have a computer better than what was available 20 years ago (better than what sent men to the moon) in the palm of your hand plus a camera plus a recording device plus a calculator plus all the apps that never existed before and yet you're blase about it?

Dude!. Wake up. The pace of change is truly amazing. Not to go Kurzweilian on you but this world is changing faster than ever and you're not seeing it; not appreciating the beauty; nor aware of the dangers.

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're typing on a device that stores trillions of pieces of data and makes billions of computations per second with the ability to grab data on almost anything from around the world in milliseconds, using electricity transmitted from hundreds of kilometers through wires on towers dozens of meters tall connected to megastructures that do things like burn coal as fast as entire trains can pull into the yard, or spin in the wind with blades the size of jumbo jets, or the like, which were delivered to their location by vehicles with computer-timed engines burning a fuel that was pumped up halfway around the world from up to half a dozen kilometers underground and locked into complex strata (through wells drilled by diamond-lined bores that can be remote-control steered as they go), shipped around the world in tankers with volumes the size of large city blocks and the height of apartment complexes, run through complex chemical processes in unimaginable quantities, distributed nationwide and sold to you at a corner store for $1.80 a gallon, which you then pay for with a little piece of microchipped plastic, if not a smartphone, which does all of the aforementioned computer stuff but in a box the size of your hand that tolerates getting beaten up in your pocket all day.

But technology never seems to advance...

In the words of the great Janet Jackson:

What have you done for me lately?

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

You could well have a cell phone with a two month battery life - if the power draw was the same as it used to be back in the day. Those Nokia phones that went two weeks between charges in the late 90s had 1Ah batteries, and some smartphones are around 4Ah now. Of course, now we have big bright screens and Wi-Fi and multi-core processors to use up all that power. But the batteries definitely have improved whether you've noticed it or not.

Re:Science!

[yodleboy]

if he had a newsletter, i'd most certainly subscribe to it!

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading about nanotechnology for about 15 years now, and I know universities are all abuzz about it, but so far I haven't seen it affect my life in any meaningful way.

You should check out any cell phone or tablet or laptop made in the last 10 years then. You're really missing out not having any such devices!

nanotechnology is exactly why today's rechargeable batteries are a) rechargeable in less than units of days, and b) why they last more than 15-30 minutes per charge.

Re:Science!

[PatientZero]

I'm all for easier colonoscopies every four* years, but I'm really curious how light this will make glasses and improve contact lenses (which are already essentially weightless). Science does indeed kick ass!

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

There haven't been any giant leaps in technology for as long as I can remember except for the Internet.

How is that a giant leap when it was a very gradual process of connecting more and more computers together?

I've been reading about nanotechnology for about 15 years now, and I know universities are all abuzz about it, but so far I haven't seen it affect my life in any meaningful way.

If you're using the internet, then you've been using products utilizing various advances in thin film deposition.

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

But of the 5.32e1568 uses for graphene that seem to have been found so far, not one of them has been found to be practical.

Only if you define practical as "affordable and useful for joe-sixpack" instead of just affordable and useful. The lab I work in makes their own for use in chemistry research on reactivity of other things, as in not for the purpose of researching the graphene itself. Do you complain that MeV scale particle accelerators are also not practical because they are only used in industrial/medical/research environments, but not mass manufactured?

Re:Science!

[8086]

Yes, processing power and bandwidth have gone up significantly but what do we do with them? The same things we did on the old systems. You could stream video on 56k using Real player, or play Doom with your friends over 9600 baud. Now there is Netflix and GTA Online. Apart from a little extra HTML5/Ajax widgetry, Slashdot looked and functioned pretty much the same on my 640x480 screen over a 33.6k modem. Those supercomputers in our pockets are used for random chitchat on Twitter and Facebook and playing Angry Birds. Not very different from Yahoo messenger over SMS and Snakes. All those features you mention about the iPhone were present on the Nokia series 60 phones about 15 years ago. Even modern smartphones themselves have had pretty much the same feature set for the last 4-5 years. The base technologies have improved vastly and everything is bigger, faster and better now, but what I'm trying to say is that the way we use them hasn't changed all that much, i.e. the use cases have remained pretty much the same and not as many new use cases (such as booking taxis over the internet) have come up as I would expect with exponential growth in the technology. It's the exact same painting made with a thousand more strokes.

Re:Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

This KFC/TB smells like urine.

zone plate

[Khashishi]

Come on, did the author not have room to fit in two words, "zone plate"?

Re: Graphene again

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, soon they will add 3D printing and _then_ the word will be saved.

Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses

[piRSqrd]

Great! I can have a better way to fix my vision without scary surgery. Seriously though, what would glasses be like with this tech?

Re:Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses

[leftover]

Monochromatic.

Re: Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses

[ceoyoyo]

Incredibly delicate?

Re:Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses

[RockDoctor]

No.

FTFP(A) :

far-field three-dimensional subwavelength focusing (Î3/5) with an absolute focusing efficiency of >32% for a broad wavelength range from 400 to 1,500ânm.

That's a little under 1.5 octaves, whereas the human vision range is only about an octave (with some variation between individuals).

Diffraction limit maybe becaus blue light waveleng

[Anonymous Coward]

The wavelength of blue light is 400 nm.
Half a wavelength of blue light thus is 200 nm.
The article mentions the lens is able to resolve features as small as the diffraction limit.
Not which wavelength of light is used when resolving features as small as 200 nm.
Calling the ultra-thin lens diffraction limit breaking might be a bit premature.

Improved mobile phones ... I'm so excited

[Anonymous Coward]

eeeee ggg hhhh wowowow

MOD PARENT UP

[H_Fisher]

What Rei said. We spend so much time (and by "we" I mean "people in the so-called First World but especially the U.S.") complaining about what we don't have, we forget how much we DO have, and what we HAVE accomplished — "we" in this case being "humanity." There's a lot to appreciate, which is why I like hearing about these advances.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

What Rei said. We spend so much time (and by "we" I mean "people in the so-called First World but especially the U.S.") complaining about what we don't have, we forget how much we DO have, and what we HAVE accomplished — "we" in this case being "humanity."

Nope. A little meritocracy please. These wonderful things [~90% of them] were invented in Europe and the USA [not necessarily in this order]. The rest of the lazy, inane, backwards societies deserve no credit. [see Brazilians partying Carnaval like theres no Zika epidemics, totally alienated from reality, unable of introspective thinking that enables invention. Can those folks invent anything?]

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

These wonderful things were invented by productive individuals. The rest of the lazy, inane, backwards individuals in Europe and the USA deserve no credit. That includes you, Mr Jingoism.

Re:Graphene again

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about it - last week a dipshit from Greenpeace was educating me on how trees "decide" how much water they absorb by using Quantum!

Use in lithography ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this not be used for making smaller chips ?

Re:Use in lithography ?

[RockDoctor]

Probably not, because it's less efficient than a standard lens.

FTFP (not the bullshit summary on Gizmodo):

far-field three-dimensional subwavelength focusing (Î^3/5) with an absolute focusing efficiency of >32% for a broad wavelength range from 400 to 1,500ânm.

That compares to the 1.22*Î/3.6um ~ Î/3 diameter of an Airy disc for this lens. But the diffraction pattern contains about 83% of the beam intensity in the central disc (the Airy disc proper) compared to 32% in the central spot for this system.

That energy will go somewhere. So you might get a sharper-focussed image from this, but you'll lose contrast.

To mis-quote the First and Second laws, you can't win and you can't even break even.

Re:Use in lithography ?

[lucien86]

This is the kind of thing that might lead towards nano-scale optical computing. And is also a potential small step towards the holy grail of tech - molecular scale assemblers.. Its even made of roughly the right material - grapheme - not such a large step from diamond composites...

SI Units

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Angstroms (Ã...)? Less ambiguous than billionth of anything.

Stupid /. adding an ellipsis.

Traditional 'billion'

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are using the traditional English form of 'billion' in which case one billionth of a metre = 1 picometre.

This is less common and the use of 'meter', which in English is the spelling that refers to a device which measures rather than the length, suggests that it is written in American with the small billion but nevertheless as a previous poster pointed out a 'billionth of a metre' is ambiguous.

Re:Traditional 'billion'

[Anonymous Coward]

Billion is not ambiguous to any English speaking person under 40 - and shouldn't be for any under 60 (but sometimes old habits die hard).

Pics or it didn't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any cool pictures this lens has produced yet?

Graphene vs. Donald Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will save the world first?

Re:Graphene vs. Donald Trump

[RockDoctor]

Graphene.

Trump will try to destroy the world.

Quite right, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are completely correct.

However... I wonder if you have ever heard of the run-on sentence?

Perhaps you have, since along with owning the grandparent poster, you have created a world class example of one.

Run on, right on :)

Re:Diffraction limit maybe becaus blue light wavel

[Whiternoise]

Given that the paper is in fact open access: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... ...

Why not link that in the summary instead of Gizmag's nonsense article ?

Also I'm confused. The paper says the lens thickness is 200nm. So where did the "1 billionth of a metre" come into it? From the paper: "a large size 200-nm-thick GO thin film is prepared on a glass substrate".

To address your question they show focused spots in wavelengths from the VIS-NIR (400-1000nm ish). The focus performance is pretty much constant throughout.

Re:FOOT/POUND/SECONDS FUCK YEAH!

[GLMDesigns]

and here we have the spouting of another ignorant bigot.

Wait

[pruedz]

Football, Football. Or that American Handegg game?

Re:Wait

[PatientZero]

The OP obviously meant real football, y'know, the one where you carry and throw around an oblong "ball" with your "armfeet".

Re:Wait

[silentcoder]

You mean armoured rugby for pussies ?

Re: Wait

[LinuxLuver]

Best description ever.

Re: Graphene again

[PatientZero]

Sweet! I'm pretty sure inhaling graphene microdust will prove to have no long term health effects.

But there are still no flying cars or jetpacks.

[jeffb (2.718)]

And apparently, if today's technology doesn't allow drunken fools to wipe out whole families by crashing into their vehicles from above, it's crap.

In other news, autonomous cars that may help with the drunk-driver problem are coming along nicely, thanks to... Science! Er, technology.

Real Uses ???

[lucien86]

Reposting This from inside the debate -

This lens is the kind of thing that might lead towards nano-scale optical computing. And is also a potential small step towards the holy grail of tech - molecular scale assemblers.. Its even made of roughly the right material - grapheme - not such a large step from diamond composites...

Re:FOOT/POUND/SECONDS FUCK YEAH!

[uninformedLuddite]

I said nothing

Hoverboards

[q4Fry]

Yeah but what's still missing? Hoverboard!

False. You can get one for $20k.