Slashdot Mirror
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.
they better get some superglue and put it back together before someone finds out.
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-."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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!!!
One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm
200nm thick graphene oxide lens
Highly efficient and ultra-broadband graphene oxide ultrathin lenses with three-dimensional subwavelength focusing
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Meh, I think even us Brits have accepted the American definition by now.
Come on, did the author not have room to fit in two words, "zone plate"?
The BBC News threw in the towel over billion a quarter of a century ago. I was watching live.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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...
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
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.
Monochromatic.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
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.
Incredibly delicate?
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.
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.
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields.
That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
and here we have the spouting of another ignorant bigot.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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...
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
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.