New Optical Meta Surfaces May Revolutionize Night Vision

Researchers at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) have developed an extremely thin infrared filter—thinner than cling wrap—that can be placed on regular glasses. This innovation allows users to see both visible and infrared light simultaneously, making night vision technology more practical for everyday use.

Traditional night vision devices are bulky, require heavy cryogenic cooling systems, and often block visible light. The new technology from TMOS uses a special meta surface made of lithium niobate – a synthetic salt consisting of niobium, lithium, and oxygen – which takes multiple low-energy photons (such as infrared light) and converts them into a single high-energy photon (such as visible light). By using this material, the new filter is lightweight and works at room temperature, eliminating the need for bulky equipment.

“People have said that high-efficiency up-conversion of infrared to visible is impossible because of the amount of information not collected due to the angular loss inherent in non-local meta surfaces,” said researcher Laura Valencia Molina. “We overcome these limitations and experimentally demonstrate high-efficiency image up-conversion.”

Optical meta surfaces are specially engineered surfaces consisting of a dense array of nanoscale structures that interact with light in precise ways, allowing for the manipulation of light’s phase, amplitude, and polarization. Unlike traditional optical components, which rely on bulk materials and gradual refraction, meta surfaces achieve their effects through abrupt changes in light properties at the nanoscale. This enables them to perform complex optical functions, such as focusing or filtering light, in a much more compact and efficient manner. In applications like night vision, meta surfaces can convert infrared light into visible light without the need for bulky equipment.

Miniaturizing night vision could lead to widespread adoption. Creating night vision filters that weigh less than a gram and can sit as a film across a pair of traditional glasses opens up new, everyday applications. Consumer night vision glasses that allow the user to see the visible and infrared spectrum simultaneously could result in safer driving in the dark, safer nighttime walks, and less hassle working in low-light conditions that currently require bulky and often uncomfortable headlamps.

“These results promise significant opportunities for the surveillance, autonomous navigation, biological imaging, and many other industries,” said TMOS Chief Investigator Dragomir Neshev. “Decreasing the size, weight, and power requirements of night vision technology is an example of how meta-optics, and the work TMOS is doing, is crucial to Industry 4.0 and the future extreme miniaturization of technology.”

“This is the first demonstration of high-resolution up-conversion imaging from 1550 nm infrared to visible 550 nm light in a non-local meta surface,” said researcher Rocio Camacho Morales. “We choose these wavelengths because 1550 nm, an infrared light, is commonly used for telecommunications, and 550 nm is visible light to which human eyes are highly sensitive. Future research will include expanding the range of wavelengths the device is sensitive to, aiming to obtain broadband infrared imaging, as well as exploring image processing, including edge detection.”

Edge detection is used in image processing and computer vision to identify the boundaries within an image. This process is crucial for various applications, such as object recognition, image segmentation, and computer vision tasks, where understanding the shape and structure of objects is necessary.

TMOS is headquartered in Canberra, Australia, and is dedicated to pioneering research in meta-optics to develop new technologies that can be used in numerous applications across varied sectors of business and industry.