In a scene from Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, R2D2 projects a 3D hologram of Princess Leia, desperately begging for help. Filmed over 45 years ago, this scene contained some movie magic – even today we don’t have the technology to create such realistic and dynamic holograms.
Creating a discrete three-dimensional hologram will require extremely precise and fast light control, far exceeding the capabilities of existing technologies based on liquid crystals or micromirrors.
An international research group led by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent more than four years solving this high-speed optical beamforming problem. They have now demonstrated a programmable wireless device that can control light, for example by focusing a beam in a specific direction or manipulating the intensity of the light, and does this much faster than commercial devices.
They have also implemented a manufacturing process that ensures that the quality remains near perfect when the device is produced at scale. This will make their device more suitable for real world application.
A device known as a spatial light modulator could be used to create ultra-fast lidar (light sensing and range) sensors for driverless cars that can generate images of a scene about a million times faster than existing mechanical systems. It could also speed up brain scanners that use light to “see” tissue. Scanners that can render tissue faster can produce higher resolution images that are unaffected by noise from dynamic fluctuations of living tissue, such as flowing blood.
“We focus on the control of light, which has been the subject of constant research since ancient times. Our development is an important step towards the ultimate goal of complete optical control, both in space and time, for a multitude of applications using light,” said lead author Christopher Panuski in electrical engineering and computer science.
The article is a collaboration between researchers at MIT; Flexcompute, Inc.; University of Strathclyde; State University of New York Polytechnic Institute; Applied Nanotools, Inc.; Rochester Institute of Technology; and the US Air Force Research Laboratory. The senior author is Dirk Englund, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Electronics Research Laboratory (RLE) and Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL). Research published today Nature Photonics.
Source: Port Altele
