Scalable fabrication of single- and multi-layer planar lenses on fiber imaging probes

What is it about?

Modern medical endoscopes can be as thin as a human hair, but they still need miniature lenses to form clear pictures inside the body. Today most of those lenses are painstakingly machined one at a time, which drives up cost and limits how complex they can be. We show a faster, semiconductor manufacturing-compatible way to integrate ultra-thin flat lenses onto multiple optical fibers at once. We design and integrate different flat lenses onto fiber facets to showcase various imaging modalities. We also show that it supports multi-layer devices, enabling the integration of complex, multi-functional optical structures onto fibers for advanced imaging and sensing applications.

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Photo by Mimicry Hu on Unsplash

Photo by Mimicry Hu on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work will pave the way for scalable-integrating multi-functional complex optical structures, including metasurfaces and bespoke lenses, onto fibers. These advances hold significant potential for ultra-thin, high-performance imaging and sensing probes, with applications in healthcare (e.g. intravascular imaging and advanced imaging in narrow body lumens such as bile ducts) and biosciences (e.g. enhancing optical fiber imaging techniques in mouse brain studies). We anticipate that our research will make a substantial contribution to the biomedical imaging and research communities.

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