A new lens on the world: Improving the metalens with liquid crystal

Case Western Reserve University physics professor Giuseppe Strangi and collaborators at Harvard and the Italian university UniCal have taken a step toward making "metalenses" even more useful--by making them reconfigurable. They did this by harnessing nanoscale forces to infiltrate liquid crystals between those microscopic pillars, allowing them to shape and diffract the light in completely new ways--"tuning" the focusing power, Strangi said.