Devices that once took up whole rooms can now be carried in one hand. Smaller, cheaper and superior designs are the benchmarks of progress. Fueling this race of breakthroughs are the continuous efforts to miniaturize semiconductor chips. While electronics have enjoyed great success, achieving the same advancements has been challenging for optical devices, such as camera lenses.
This can all be changed using metasurfaces, which are thin structures nanoengineered to have unique optical properties based on the material they are made of, as well as their structural geometries. Such metasurface structures, in principle, can be fabricated in semiconductor factories that make the most advanced silicon chips.
However, in practice, these processes are expensive, time-consuming and difficult to access for small-scale exploratory projects or prototyping, leaving many novel theories untested.