PhotoniX

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A planar compound eye based microsystem for high precision 3D perception

Three-dimensional (3D) panoramic vision system plays a fundamental role in the biological perception of external information, and naturally becomes a key system for embodied intelligence to interact with the outside world. A binocular vision system with rotating eyeball has long baseline, large volume and weak sensitivity to motion. A compound eye system has small volume, high sensitivity to motion but poor precision. Here, a planar compound eye microsystem for high precision 3D perception is proposed by combining semiconductor manufacturing process and biological compound eye structure. Using a semiconductor planar image sensor as the sensing unit, a space-coded planar sub-eye array is designed and its sub field of view (FOV) is dynamically mapped to the image sensor. It solves the problem that a traditional vision system cannot simultaneously accommodate wide FOV with long focal length and high sensitivity to motion with high resolution. The parallax among different sub-eyes enables the system to accurately perceive and dynamically track the 3D position of the target in the range of 10 m and within the FOV of 120 ° in a single compound eye. This system is of great significance in the fields of intelligent robot and intelligent perception.

Cascaded chiral birefringent media enabled planar lens with programable chromatic aberration

Wavefront control is the fundamental requirement in optical informatics. Planar optics have drawn intensive attention due to the merits of compactness and light weight. However, it remains a challenge to freely manipulate the dispersion, hindering practical applications, especially in imaging. Here, we propose the concept of frequency-synthesized phase engineering to solve this problem. A phasefront-frequency matrix is properly designed to encode different spatial phases to separate frequencies, thus makes arbitrary dispersion tailoring and even frequency-separated functionalization possible. The periodically rotated director endows cholesteric liquid crystal with a spin and frequency selective reflection. Moreover, via presetting the local initial orientation of liquid crystal, geometric phase is encoded to the reflected light. We verify the proposed strategy by cascading the chiral anisotropic optical media of specifically designed helical pitches and initial director orientations. By this means, planar lenses with RGB achromatic, enhanced chromatic aberration and color routing properties are demonstrated. Inch-sized and high-efficient lenses are fabricated with low crosstalk among colors. It releases the freedom of dispersion control of planar optics, and even enables frequency decoupled phase modulations. This work brings new insights to functional planar optics and may upgrade the performance of existing optical apparatuses.

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Editor-in-Chief Min Gu "It is no doubt that photonics has become a key enabling technology platform for our sustainable life. It is at this exciting time that we welcome the arrival of the inaugural issue of the journal, PhotoniX, to our photonics community. We aim that the new journal not only truly showcases the enabling power of photonics, but also strives to develop this power into cultivating industries as well as improving the competitiveness, the scope and depth of science and technology in general..." 

Editor-in-Chief Min Qiu "This open-access journal focuses on photonic technology with cutting-edge, multidisciplinary and derivative characteristics, aiming to become a platform to promote the international frontier "Enabling Technology". It comes at a crucial moment when both academia and industry urgently need a platform to explore the true enabling power of photonics..." 

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He is Executive Chancellor and Distinguished Professor of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. He was Distinguished Professor and Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor at RMIT University and a Laureate Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He is an author of 4 standard reference books and has over 500 publications in nano/biophotonics. He is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering as well as foreign fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He is also an elected fellow of the AIP, the OSA, the SPIE, the InstP, and the IEEE. He was President of the International Society of Optics within Life Sciences, Vice President of the Board of the International Commission for Optics (ICO) (Chair of the ICO Prize Committee) and a Director of the Board of the Optical Society of America (Chair of the International Council). He was awarded the Einstein Professorship, the W. H. (Beattie) Steel Medal, the Ian Wark Medal, the Boas Medal and the Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation. He is a winner of the 2019 Dennis Gabor Award of SPIE.

He received the B.S. and the Ph.D degrees in electronics from Jilin University, Changchun, China, in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Satellite Venture Business Laboratory, the University of Tokushima, Japan, from 1996 to 2000, and then as an assistant professor in Department of Applied Physics, Osaka University, Japan. In 2004, he was promoted as a full professor (Changjiang Scholar) in Jilin University, and since 2017 he has been working in Tsinghua University, China. His research interests have been focused on nano-photonic fabrication and characterization. So far, he has published over 500 scientific papers, which have been cited for over 28000 times, and H factor is 88, according to ISI search report. He is IEEE, OSA and SPIE fellow.

He received the Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang University in 1999. He received his second Ph.D. degree and became an assistant professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, in 2001. He became a full professor (Professor of Photonics) at KTH in 2009. Since 2010, he became a distinguished professor at Zhejiang University. He was the Director of State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University. He joined Westlake University as a Chair Professor of Photonics in April 2018. His research interests include nanofabrication technology, nanophotonics, and green photonics. He was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015, a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and a fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) in 2013. He is leading a project on solar thermal energy utilization through the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFA0205700). He is currently an editor of Optics Communications (Elsevier), a topical editor of Light: Science and Applications (Springer Nature), and an associate editor of Science Bulletin (Science China Press).