Meta-imaging- Sensing, Processing and Computing with Dynamic Metasurfaces
Abstract
Optical sensing and imaging of the world around us is of critical importance for a wide variety of technologies from defense-, environmental- and medical- applications to consumer products. With a conventional camera, objects in a 3D scene are mapped to a 2D intensity projection captured on a photosensor. By virtue of the detection process, the rich information encoded in the incident wavefront about the specific way in which matter in the scene has interacted with the light - such as polarization, depth, phase, coherence, and incidence angle - is irreversibly lost. Current technologies for advanced optical sensing have limited performance and rely on bulky and costly scanning systems severely limiting their usage. An additional challenge is presented by the needfor high-throughput, real-time, and low power image processing of increasingly large data sets which digital electronics alone is ill-suited for. Our MURI team will exploit breakthroughs in the fields of metasurfaces, computational design, fundamental modal optics, and information theory to enable a new paradigm for sensing, processing and computing by utilizing metasurfaces to detect additional degrees of freedom of the lightfield and process the information at the speed of light – all while reducing the size and weight of imaging systems. To move towards such a new reality, we bring together world-leading experts in metasurfaces, nanoscale optics, optoelectronics and image processing. Our overarching goal is to deepen our understanding of metasurface-based imaging systems ( meta-imaging ) that can extract and simultaneously process the rich information from an optical scene with the following specific objectives- (1) Demonstrate metasurface-enabled sensing capable of extracting additional degrees of freedom of light and develop new methods for optical image processing to extract and process the maximum possible information from such data in an automated fashion. (2) Explore the use of programmable metasurfaces to perform front-end optical processing and computing using highly nonlinear and reconfigurable material platforms. (3) Discover new opportunities and concepts for photon-to-charge conversion processes enabled by nanophotonics, including detector sensitivity and speed. (4) Reveal the theoretical ultimate performance and scaling limits in power consumption, speed, photon sorting, conversion efficiency, and volume, and implement metasurfaces operating at or close to these limits. This project represents a new research frontier at the intersection of nanoscience, photonics, photon-to-charge-conversion and information science and will lay the foundation for advanced imaging in an on-chip platform critical for a range of DOD missions demanding ultra-small size, weight and power.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110312
Entities
People
- Maiken H Mikkelsen
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Duke University
- United States Air Force