In the 21 century, optical technologies start to gather fruits for its long investment in research and development supported by technologies developed for microelectronics. The basic driver is miniaturization and with the maturity of micro- and nanofabrication tools even standard optical components like lenses will change their appearance. Especially the move from single components, to complete systems and their integral optimization will challenge the research and development activities and opens a disruptive pathway to optical component design and manufacture. Everything gets smaller, everything must interact perfectly, and everything should be designed together. If we look at technologies, what are the ongoing challenges? As mentioned optics uses many different techniques but with the same goal: achieving the optical quality of the components. The term “optical quality” stands for nanometer precision. For lenses, it means excellent surface definition and quality, but for nanostructured components, its definition becomes more complex and includes uniformity over surfaces of millimeter size. If we look at miniaturization in optics, we see several challenges.
Firstly, the optical elements need to be connected to the macroscopic world and will need to cover a certain surface or volume. High-quality production over millimeters for nanometer scale structures needs to be developed.
Secondly, to fully profit from the fine structure of the components one would like to change parameters of nanostructures locally. With mm size optical element and a 100 nm sized basic structural element, one ends up with more than 100 million elements. If only a few of them are used for the design of an optical function, then the parameters space for optimization will not be manageable with conventional design approaches. An optical multidimensional system design can handle many parameters and is based on a rigorous method which needs to become the standard. An optical design will become a big data problem.
A third challenge is the characterization at different lengths of scale. Often underestimated, is the link between the quality of nanostructures and its optical function, which is not easy to establish. The ultimate characterization technique would have a large field of view in the millimeter range – to see the whole element at once and still deliver nanometer resolution. But such techniques do not exist yet and would lead to data volumes for analyses that are not manageable by the existing informatics infrastructure. The optical characterization is already a big problem where data is concerned.
Our activities are based on experiences in the most modern fields of research in optics: nano-photonics including meta-surfaces and meta-materials, micro-optics referring to refractive and diffractive structures and system optics which takes up the different aspects of integrating such components. NOLOSS allows 15 fellows to pursue their PhDs in the industry in the framework of a European Indus- trial Doctorate (EID) Marie Curie Actions. With 12 participants, including nine partners from the industry, this allows us to widen the view of technology development at industrial partners, as they expand their network to SMEs that would not otherwise be possible.
