A team of scientists has created an ultra-thin coating that can provide high-efficiency night vision to any glass surface, including ordinary reading glasses. Designed using something called a non-local metasurface, the plastic-wrap-thin coating also lets through all of the visible light, allowing users to see perfectly during daytime or at night.
Some previous efforts using a non-local metasurface to create a night vision coating have shown limited success. However, those efforts have suffered from severely limited image quality. The inventors of this newest coating say they have broken through that barrier, resulting in a high-definition image visible light image that could rival the infrared to visible light up-conversion rates of bulkier, more complex night vision systems already in commercial use today.
“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 that is inherent in non-local metasurfaces,” explained Laura Valencia Molina, a researcher from the Australian National University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS). “We overcome these limitations and experimentally demonstrate high-efficiency image up-conversion.”
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