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

Breaks the Diffraction Limit...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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-."

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: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...