"Folded" Optical Devices Manipulate Light in a New Way

Andrei Faraon, Professor of Applied Physics, and colleagues have introduced a technology called "folded metasurface optics," which is a way of printing multiple types of metasurfaces onto either side of a substrate, like glass. In this way, the substrate itself becomes the propagation space for the light. As a proof of concept, the team used the technique to build a spectrometer. Such compact spectrometers have a variety of possible uses, including as a noninvasive blood-glucose measuring system. [Caltech story]