Rice ‘metalens’ could disrupt vacuum UV market

By precisely etching hundreds of tiny triangles on the surface of a microscopic film of zinc oxide, the study’s co-author Naomi Halas and colleagues said they created a metalens that transforms incoming long-wave UV (UV-A) into a focused output of vacuum UV (VUV) radiation.

VUV is used in semiconductor manufacturing, photochemistry and materials science but can be costly to work with, partly because it's absorbed by almost all types of glass used to make conventional lenses.

“This work is particularly promising in light of recent demonstrations that chip manufacturers can scale up the production of metasurfaces with CMOS-compatible processes,” Halas said in a statement. “This is a fundamental study, but it clearly points to a new strategy for high-throughput manufacturing of compact VUV optical components and devices.”

According to the team, its microscopic metalens could convert 394nm UV into a focused output of 197nm VUV. The disc-shaped metalens is a transparent sheet of zinc oxide thinner than a sheet of paper — just 45 millionths of a metre in diameter.