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Tuesday 3 October 2017

Graphene, Not Glass, Is The Key To Better Optics

Source: nanocomputer.com --- Monday, October 02, 2017
A lens just a billionth of a metre thick could transform phone cameras. Researchers at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, have created ultra-thin lenses that cap an optical fibre , and can produce images with the quality and sharpness of much larger glass lenses . “ Compared with current lenses, our graphene lens only needs one film to achieve the same resolution ,” says Professor Baohua Jia, a research leader at Swinburne ’s Centre for Micro-Photonics. “ In the future, mobile phones could be much thinner, without having to sacrifice the quality of their cameras. Our lens also allows infrared light to pass through, which glass lenses don’t.” Producing graphene can be costly and challenging, so Baohua and her colleagues used a laser to pattern layers of graphene oxide ( graphene combined with oxygen ). By then removing the oxygen , they produced low-cost , patterned films of graphene , a thousand times thinner than a human hair . “ By patterning the graphene oxide film in this way, its optical and electrical properties can be altered, which allowed us to place them in different devices, ” she says. Warm objects give off infrared light , so mobile phones with graphene lenses could be used to scan for hotspots in the human body and help in the early identification of diseases like breast cancer . By attaching the lens to a fibre optic tip, endoscopes — instruments that are currently several millimetres wide —could be mad ...



from Australia http://ift.tt/2hJRqrW

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