2022/04/19 by Kunal Shastri, Francesco Monticone, Shastri, Kunal +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Optical Coatings and Gratings #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Photonic and Optical Devices
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.09154
openalex publication_date 2022/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Optical systems with wide field-of-views (FOV) are crucial for many applications such as high performance imaging, optical projection, augmented/virtual reality, and miniaturized medical imaging tools. Typically, aberration-free imaging with a wide FOV is achieved by stacking multiple refractive lenses (as in a "fisheye" lens), adding to the size and weight of the optical system. Single metalenses designed to have a wide FOV have the potential to replace these bulky imaging systems and, moreover, they may be dispersion engineered for spectrally broadband operation. In this paper, we derive a fundamental bound on the spectral bandwidth of dispersion-engineered wide-FOV achromatic metalenses. We show that for metalenses with a relatively large numerical aperture (NA), there is a tradeoff between the maximum achievable bandwidth and the FOV; interestingly, however, the bandwidth reduction saturates beyond a certain FOV that depends on the NA of the metalens. These findings may provide important information and insights for the design of future wide-FOV achromatic flat lenses.