[Scientific frontier] Mendeleev once said, "Science starts from measurement." Optical imaging expands the cognitive boundary of human beings, promotes the progress of science, and is also widely used in all aspects of life. However, due to unavoidable mirror processing errors, system design defects and environmental disturbances, the actual imaging resolution and signal-to-noise ratio are often significantly lower than perfect imaging systems. How to achieve perfect optical imaging without aberration is one of the most important and unresolved problems in optics. The reporter learned from Tsinghua University that recently, the imaging and intelligent technology laboratory of Tsinghua University proposed an integrated meta imaging chip architecture, which opens a new path to solve this century old problem. Different from building a perfect lens, the research team has developed a new way to develop a super sensor to record the imaging process rather than the image itself. Through the realization of super fine perception and fusion of incoherent complex light fields, even through imperfect optical lenses and complex imaging environments, perfect three-dimensional optical imaging can still be achieved. This achievement was recently published in the journal Nature in the form of a long article entitled "3D photography with integrated imaging chip for aberration correction". Reducing optical aberrations is a century old optical problem. The transmission of light through various surfaces of the optical system will form a variety of aberrations, resulting in blurring, deformation and other defects in the imaging. An important task of optical system design is to correct these aberrations so that the imaging quality can meet the technical requirements. The traditional optical system is mainly designed for the human eye. Adhering to the design concept of "what you see is what you get", it focuses on the optical end to achieve perfect imaging. In the past hundred years, optical scientists and engineers have constantly proposed new optical design methods to customize complex multi-stage mirror, aspheric and free-form surface lenses for different imaging systems to reduce aberration and improve imaging performance. However, due to the limitation of processing technology and the disturbance of complex environment, it is difficult to create a perfect imaging system. "For example, due to the processing error of a large range of surface flatness, it is difficult to manufacture super large aperture lenses to achieve ultra long distance high-resolution imaging; ground-based astronomical telescopes are subject to the dynamic changes of atmospheric turbulence, and the actual imaging resolution is far lower than the optical diffraction limit, which limits the ability of human beings to explore the universe, and it is often expensive to launch space telescopes to bypass the atmosphere." Dai Qionghai, leader of the research team, academician of the CAE Member, and professor of the Department of Automation of Tsinghua University, introduced. In order to solve this problem, adaptive optics technology emerged as the times require. People perceive the environmental aberration disturbance in real time through wavefront sensors, and feed it back to a deformable mirror array to dynamically correct the corresponding optical aberration, so as to maintain a perfect imaging process. Based on this, people found a huge black hole at the center of the galaxy. However, due to the non-uniform spatial distribution of aberrations, this technology can only achieve high-resolution imaging in a very small field of view, and it is difficult to achieve simultaneous correction in a large field of view and multiple areas, and because of the need for very sophisticated complex systems, the cost is often very high. Integrating all technologies on a single imaging chip In recent years, the rapid development of digitalization has given birth to the interdisciplinary subject of computational optics, which provides a new idea for the design of advanced imaging systems. The reporter learned from Tsinghua University that as early as 2
Edit：Ying Ying Responsible editor：Wang Chen
Source：GMW.cn
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