Wide field of view and light weight optics are critical for advanced eyewear, with applications in augmented/virtual reality and night vision. Conventional refractive lenses are often stacked to correct aberrations at a wide field of view, leading to limited performance and increased size and weight. In particular, simultaneously achieving a wide field of view and large aperture for light collection is desirable but challenging to realize in a compact form-factor. Here, we demonstrate a wide field of view (greater than 60^∘) meta-optic doublet eyepiece with an entrance aperture of 2.1 cm. At the design wavelength of 633 nm, the meta-optic doublet achieves comparable performance to a refractive lens-based eyepiece system. This meta-doublet eyepiece illustrates the potential for meta-optics to play an important role in the development of high-quality monochrome near-eye displays and night vision systems.

We demonstrate a method to enhance the atom loading rate of a ytterbium (Yb) magneto-optic trap (MOT) operating on the 556 nm ¹S₀ → ³P₁ intercombination transition (narrow linewidth Γ_g = 2π × 182 kHz). Following traditional Zeeman slowing of an atomic beam near the 399 nm ¹S₀ → ¹P₁ transition (broad linewidth Γ_p = 2π × 29 MHz), two laser beams in a crossed-beam geometry, frequency tuned near the same transition, provide additional slowing immediately prior to the MOT. Using this technique, we observe an improvement by a factor of 6 in the atom loading rate of a narrow-line Yb MOT. The relative simplicity and generality of this approach make it readily adoptable to other experiments involving narrow-line MOTs. We also present a numerical simulation of this two-stage slowing process, which shows good agreement with the observed dependence on experimental parameters, and use it to assess potential improvements to the method.

A broad range of imaging and sensing technologies in the infrared require large field-of-view (FoV) operation. To achieve this, traditional refractive systems often employ multiple elements to compensate for aberrations, which leads to excess size, weight, and cost. For many applications, including night vision eye-wear, air-borne surveillance, and autonomous navigation for unmanned aerial vehicles, size and weight are highly constrained. Sub-wavelength diffractive optics, also known as meta-optics, can dramatically reduce the size, weight, and cost of these imaging systems, as meta-optics are significantly thinner and lighter than traditional refractive lenses. Here, we demonstrate 80° FoV thermal imaging in the long-wavelength infrared regime (8–12 µm) using an all-silicon meta-optic with an entrance aperture and lens focal length of 1 cm.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) represent a significant milestone in image classification, recognition, and tracking.¹ CNNs, for example, AlexNet, are composed of several convolutional layers that adaptively learn spatial representations from input images. Although powerful, the convolution operation is computationally expensive, leading to high latency and power consumption. In fact, it has been estimated that $\sim 80\%$ of the total runtime of CNNs is used in performing convolution operations.² Reducing this latency and, as a result, power consumption has become an active area of research, with multiple works proposing free-space optical systems as a solution.^{3 – 8} Beyond reducing latency and power consumption, optical information processing offers advantages including high bandwidth, spatial parallelism, and low-loss transmission, which have led to a surge of interest in the field.³

Lenses with dynamic focal length, also called zoom functionality, enable a variety of applications related to imaging and sensing. The traditional approach of stacking refractive lenses to achieve this functionality results in an expensive, heavy optical system. Especially for applications in the mid-infrared, light weight and compact form factor are required. In this work, we use a meta-optic triplet to demonstrate zoom imaging at mid-wave infrared wavelengths. By varying the axial distances between the optics, the meta-optic triplet achieves high-quality imaging over a zoom range of 5×, with a 50° full field of view in the widest configuration and an aperture of 8 mm. This triplet system demonstrates the potential for meta-optics to reduce conventional components in complex and multi-functional imaging systems to dramatically thinner and lighter components.

Long-range imaging in the thermal infrared band is critical for applications, such as environmental monitoring, industrial inspections, and surveillance. To achieve high-quality imaging, these systems typically require large apertures and many elements with aspheric lens profiles to correct aberrations, adding significant weight and cost. Large-area metasurface optics offer a promising solution for weight reduction; however, their substantial chromatic aberrations limit their effectiveness in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) band where broadband imaging is typically desired. In this work, we introduce a hybrid system comprising four refractive lenses and two all-silicon metasurface correctors (meta-correctors) to achieve high-quality, broadband thermal imaging at long range. Compared to a refractive-only assembly, our system demonstrates a threefold contrast enhancement at the detector’s half-Nyquist frequency. Testing outside the laboratory reveals noticeably sharper images, with human features clearly recognizable at distances of 250 m. The assembly utilizes off-the-shelf refractive elements and avoids the use of germanium, which poses a supply chain risk. Our findings highlight the potential of hybrid meta-corrector systems to enable long-range, lightweight, and cost-effective LWIR imaging solutions.