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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

  Operating at telecom wavelengths (i.e., the range commonly used in fiber-optic 
  communications), the new device is completely scalable, from near-infrared to 
  terahertz wavelengths, and simple to manufacture.

Ho ho, very clever use of words there. Terahertz is far-far infrared, (1mm to .1mm (1,000,000-100,000nm) wavelength) while NIR is around 1,000nm. Visible light is 740-380nm.

To the best of my knowledge, (this isn't my field) nobody has ever made a visible-light metamaterial. The antennas are too small. There's no real physical reason we can't make red-light metamaterials, the problem is just fabrication. (A parallel can be drawn here between metamaterials, desktop nanofactories, and fusion reactors)

Additionally, it would be tricky to make a panchromatic metamaterial lens: metamaterials are tuned very precisely to one frequency, (color) constrained by the physical size of the antennas, and they can't transmit any others.

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To the best of my knowledge, (this isn't my field) nobody has ever made a visible-light metamaterial."

You would be wrong, see this CalTech press release: http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13341

However the thing that makes this interesting is that every single SFP+ single mode fiber tranciever (and if you've got a datacenter you probably have a lot of those) has a glass lens which focuses the light from the fiber onto the detector. Losses in the system affect how far you can run that fiber and/or how bright the laser at the source end needs to be. So this invention has the potential of making those connections both cheaper (easier to manufacture) and more efficient (no light lost due to abberations in the lens). So that is a pretty big deal.

USC professor Tim Strand was doing research into holographic lenses back in the early 80's. Basically trying to create a white light hologram of a lens system. Cool concept that didn't get far enough unfortunately. (I kept hoping one day we'd have a sticker you put put on your sunglasses and it would turn them into prescription glasses for you.)

10^3 range of wavelengths sounds pretty damn scalable to me.

Metamaterials for visible light wavelengths do exist. One that got note in the press a few years ago has a negative index of refraction.

Panchromaticity could be accomplished via a color array scheme similar to what is already common in lithographic optic devices.

This not being your area is precisely why you should extend the researches some respect, rather than immediately pouncing on any plausible rhetorical trick to make yourself seem expert when you are not.

Sorry, upon rereading this it's more grumpy than I like; but in the interests of transparency I won't edit it. Just frustrated at a general trend on hacker news of assuming straw men when it's clear they don't exist from slightly more deliberate reading of the primary source.

I don't get why every science article gets negative comments like this. Just because something doesn't have immediate practical applications doesn't mean its not interesting research.

Of course it's annoying when they are overly optimistic(either because of journalists trying to make the finding interesting, or researchers trying to get more funding), but that's to be expected.

Where headline is not accurate, it bears pointing out. I had no idea that this is not in fact a visible light lense.

The headline is accurate (unless hacker-news had one that has one that has now been edited away).

If you had read the article you would know precisely what wavelengths the device is applicable to (3rd paragraph even), and why it's an exciting research development.

I think 99% of the readers understand visible light photography when you say "image".

That's their mistake. Use of the term 'image' for non visible wavelengths is common. Examples: thermal, radar, xray, gamma.

Oh bullshit.

The flat lens eliminates optical aberrations such as the “fish-eye” effect that results from conventional wide-angle lenses.

Surely you wouldn't claim that is referring to wide-angle thermal lenses?

“In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta, a visiting graduate student from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. “It certainly captures the imagination.”

Oh yes it does. If you help the imagination along with misleading phrasing, that is. If you don't believe me, just read the rest of the comments here, most of them expecting to see some application in photography.

If you get good glass it'll beat the resolution/noisiness of your sensor anyway. Distortion and aberration can be fixed in software quite well; it sure beats waiting that won't come for a long, long time, if even ever.

Don't get me wrong, this is cool for what it actually applies to, but flirting with "capturing the imagination" in such ways gets no respect from me.

That chart is misleading. The use of the "visible spectrum" to illustrate gradations of "delta" in the IR band is redundant. A luminosity scale, in grey or monotone (say red?) would be more appropriate from a visual design perspective. No?

False color images are common, but yeah I agree that's somewhat confusing.

It's not an article; it's a press release. They're all the same whether they come from Harvard, MIT or Podunk U.

>To the best of my knowledge, (this isn't my field) nobody has ever made a visible-light metamaterial.

http://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/dl-mft010407.php?...

http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=42007

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/nanofishnet-co...

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