CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 4, 2021 — Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) has granted Metalenz Inc., a startup founded by applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, an exclusive, worldwide license to a portfolio of innovations in flat optics developed in the lab of Federico Capasso.
Metalenz, which plans to bring metalens technology into commercial development, announced $10 million in investments from Intel Capital, 3M Ventures, Applied Ventures, and TDK Ventures. The funding and semiconductor manufacturing expertise will enable the further engineering of metalenses toward large-scale fabrication for consumer, health care, and automotive applications, using the established technology of semiconductor chip manufacturing, said a press release issued by Harvard’s OTD.
The metalens technology exploits the interactions of light and matter at the nanometer scale to achieve unprecedented control of the behavior of light. Where conventional optics refract, reflect, and polarize light as it passes through the bulk of a material, the Capasso lab’s technology uses minuscule patterns and structures at the surface to redirect light at will. The resulting technology is a wafer-thin chip not only capable of disrupting the field of digital imaging, but also poised to enable new types of ultracompact devices for 3D sensing, augmented reality, virtual reality, and more.
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