spanning photography, cinematography, computer vision, biomedical imaging, microscopy, image projection, and beyond. Traditionally, optical zoom is realized by switching between multiple lens groups, each with a fixed zoom (e.g., in most phone cameras); or using stacked lenses where one or more of the lens elements move along the optical axis. [1][2][3] Both approaches, however, come at the cost of size, weight, complexity, cost, and sometimes image quality. Lenses made of liquids or elastomers have also been introduced to achieve zoom via shape deformation, [4][5][6][7][8] although concerns over reliability, controllability, optical quality, and scalability still loom.Metasurfaces, flat optical components which control phase, amplitude, and polarization states of light with sub-wavelength structures, have been gaining increasing traction. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Active metasurfaces, whose optical functionalities can be dynamically modulated, further enable tuning of metalens focal length via mechanisms including substrate deformation, [20][21][22][23][24] microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) actuation, [25,26] thermo-optic effect, [27] polarization multiplexing, [28][29][30][31] as well as phase transition in materials. [32][33][34] Optical zoom, however, is a more complex function that has largely remained unexplored in metasurface optics. While a number of "zoom metalens" designs have been proposed, [24,[35][36][37][38] they are in fact varifocal lenses [25,27,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] whose focal plane constantly shifts as the lens configuration changes. A true zoom metalens must be parfocal; in other words, the position of its focal plane must remain stationary when its EFL is changed. A parfocal zoom metalens design was first theoretically conceptualized by Zheng et al. [54,55] However, the design only affords a small zoom ratio. Moreover, no parfocal zoom metalens has been experimentally demonstrated to our knowledge.In this paper, we propose a non-mechanical parfocal zoom metalens design offering large zoom ratios, minimal distortion, and aberration-free optical quality. As one specific example, the design can switch between 40° (the "wide-angle" mode) and 4° (the "telephoto" mode) field-of-view (FOV) with 10× optical zoom. The concept is generic with respect to meta-atom design, which we validated through implementation of two embodiments: a polarization-multiplexing zoom metalens in the visible using waveguide-type meta-atoms; and a zoom metalens in the mid-infrared in the form of a reconfigurable Huygens' surface made of phase change materials (PCMs). Zoom lenses with variable focal lengths and magnification ratios are essential for many optical imaging applications. Conventional zoom lenses are composed of multiple refractive optics, and optical zoom is attained via translational motion of one or more lens elements, which adds to module size, complexity, and cost. In this paper, a zoom lens design based on multifunctional optical metasurfaces is ...
We report a doubly resonant continuous-wave CO(2) laser frequency-quadrupling device that generates 200nW of 2.55-mum (4?) and as much as 2mW of 5.1-mum (2?) radiation out of 1.7-W fundamental radiation at 10.2 mum (?). The quadrupling process results from two resonant cascading second-harmonic generations by use of a walk-off-compensated twin AgGaSe(2) device (??2?) and a ZnGeP(2)nonlinear crystal (2??4?).
The noise power spectral density of a detector is essential for determining the frequency of operation and readout architecture that yields an optimal signal-to-noise ratio. In this work, we characterize a waveguide-integrated PbTe mid-infrared detector and report on its noise spectrum, highlighting the presence of a current-dependent 1/f term dominating at low frequency and/or high bias over the Johnson component typical of a photoconductor. This behaviour, together with the substantially flat frequency response in the range between 1 kHz to 1 MHz, guide towards a lock-in readout strategy, that allows one to operate in the region of minimum noise without penalties in the detection performance. Practical guidelines to optimize the readout resolution are provided and the limit of detection of a gas sensing system exploiting PbTe photoconductors is derived, as an example of how a careful co-design of sensors and electronics can dramatically improve the detection performance.
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