Need for Massive Space Telescope Inspires Lightweight Flexible Holographic Lens

Inspired by a concept for discovering exoplanets with a massive space telescope, a team of researchers is developing holographic lenses that render visible and infrared starlight into either a focused image or a spectrum. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system.

The experimental method, detailed in an article appearing in Nature Scientific Reports ¹ , could be used to create a lightweight flexible lens, many metres in diameter, that could be rolled for launch and unfurled in space.

‘We use two spherical waves of light to produce the hologram, which gives us fine control over the diffractive grating recorded on the film, and the effect it has on light - either separating light with super sensitivity, or focusing light with high resolution,’ said Mei-Li Hsieh, a visiting researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an expert in optics and photonics who established a mathematical solution to govern the output of the hologram. ‘We believe this model could be useful in applications that require extremely high spectral resolution spectroscopy, such as analysis of exoplanets.’