Traditional lensmaking is a grind — literally. One starts with a piece of glass, rubs it against an abrasive surface to wear away the excess bits, and eventually gets it to just the right shape and ...

Researchers detail how they used a type of 3D printing known as two-photon lithography to create lenses that combine refractive and diffractive surfaces. In a new study, researchers have shown that 3D ...

Researchers have demonstrated that consumer-grade 3D printers and inexpensive materials can produce advanced optical ...

In order to push the performance of optical systems, aspheric- and freeform surfaces are used in state-of-the-art optic design for correcting aberrations. The production of these complex-shaped ...

Scientists have unveiled a new way to capture ultra-sharp optical images without lenses or painstaking alignment. The ...

Polarized light is one of the most powerful tools scientists have for peering inside matter, yet the way it twists, scatters and transforms inside real-world materials has long been treated as a black ...

Although optical subsystems are widespread in applications such as sensing and telecoms today, the way in which the optics components are assembled and packaged remains a tricky and time-consuming ...

A simple, cheap, and highly effective approach to achieve large tuning range of optical transmittance through harnessing surface wrinkling–cracking patterns on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) films. The ...

Manufacturing a precision surface requires a balance between satisfying the optimum quality requirements at the minimum cost. Steve Martinek summarizes the challenges of increasing the precision ...