A new kind of lens for tiny cameras

A UW team led by Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar has developed a tunable lens made of metasurfaces and actuated by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

Optics startup Tunoptix wins federal grant to develop metalenses for imaging satellites at Washington Nanofabrication Facility

A portion of the team’s experimental setup for capturing an image using a metalens. The researchers capture an image of flowers through a metalens (mounted on a microscope slide) and visualize it through a microscope.

Tunoptix, an optics startup co-founded by University of Washington (UW) electrical and computer engineering professors Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar, was awarded $223,000 in Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop metasurface lenses (or metalenses) for imaging in satellites at the UW Washington Nanofabrication Facility.