To the human eye, a metasurface looks like a thin film, however by substantially magnifying the image of a metasurface, very small structures are noticeable. Approximately ten million times smaller than a meter, these nanometric structures, or nanostructures, can be fully tailored to create particular interactions with light. More specifically, that means that arrays of nanostructures can be made so light of particular or different colors and/or polarizations will be highly reflected, transmitted or absorbed.
Previously, creating an optical filter required chemically synthesizing materials. For instance in color photography, a color filter array (CFA) is superposed on a pixel array to create color images. These CFAs are either made of dyes or pigments and cannot easily be tailored. Similarly, quantum dots, which are chemically synthesized, have been commercialized for color filtering. They have mostly been used for television display technology. Metasurfaces present a tremendous opportunity whereby color filters and shortcomings in quality of color reconstruction are no longer limited by the boundaries of material properties.
First to commercialize metasurface CFAs, namely pixel metasurface-integrated technology (PMiT), our team at Metahelios is harnessing the superior versatility of metasurfaces to develop exceptional camera modules. More to that end, we emphasize the remarkable qualities of metasurfaces through the development of the first single layer filter array (FA) that can filter both color and polarization with our Pol-RGB SPAD camera.
We believe that new and enhanced sensing solutions are and will be provided through metasurface technologies with the range of currently available and future product lines.