Keck Institute workshop at Caltech | Rubin Research Group

(Left) Poster for short-course at Caltech. (Right top) Noah and Lisa at Caltech attending the workshop. (Right bottom) An example of a forked metasurface hologram, which combines the function of an OAM phase plate with a blazed grating - these may have relevance in future corongraphs for exoplanet imaging.

Noah and Lisa attended a workshop called “Metasurface Optics for High Contrast Imaging: Design, Fabrication, and Implementation”. This workshop was hosted by the Keck Insitute for Space Studies at Caltech (KISS) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The week-long workshop brought together researchers from astronomical instrumentation and photonics to discuss outstanding hardware-level challenges in astrophysics, and where recent developments in subwavelength diffractive optics (i.e., “metasurfaces”) could potentially help. The workshop was mainly focused on the grand challenge of direct imaging of an Earth-like exoplanet (in the spirit of NASA’s planned Habitable Worlds Observatory), but also touched on other areas of general astronomical interest such as wavefront sensing and adaptive optics.

The first day of the workshop was a public short course entitled “Nano Engineering for Exo Discoveries: Advancing Metasurfaces for Exoplanet Exploration”. Noah gave the opening lecture, which described at a very introductory level the basic principles of metasurfaces. The talk traced the history and context in which this field developed out of diffractive optics. A recording of the talk is freely available online (viewable below). The complete short course is available here.

"An Introduction to 'Metasurfaces'", delivered by Noah at Caltech on September 23, 2024