Immersion Meta-Lenses at Visible Wavelengths for Nanoscale Imaging

Immersion objectives can focus light into a spot smaller than what is achievable in free space, thereby enhancing the spatial resolution for various applications such as microscopy, spectroscopy, and lithography. Despite the availability of advanced lens polishing techniques, hand-polishing is still required to manufacture the front lens of a high-end immersion objective, which poses major constraints for lens design. This limits the shape of the front lens to spherical. Therefore, several other lenses need to be cascaded to correct for spherical aberration, resulting in significant challenges for miniaturization and adding design complexity for different immersion liquids. Here, by using metasurfaces, we demonstrate liquid immersion meta-lenses free of spherical aberration at various design wavelengths in the visible spectrum. We report water and oil immersion meta-lenses of various numerical apertures (NA) up to 1.1 and show that their measured focal spot sizes are diffraction-limited with Strehl ratios of approximately 0.9 at 532 nm. By integrating the oil immersion meta-lens (NA = 1.1) into a commercial scanning confocal microscope, we achieve an imaging spatial resolution of approximately 200 nm. These meta-lenses can be easily adapted to focus light through multilayers of different refractive indices and mass-produced using modern industrial manufacturing or nanoimprint techniques, leading to cost-effective high-end optics.