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Material Witness

The limits of flatness

Nature Materials volume 22, page 148 (2023)Cite this article

Miller considers a general optical device composed of an input surface and an output surface. This could, for example, be a camera, where the input device is a lens and the output is a pixelated array of light sensors. It could equally be the eye, where the sensor layer is the retina. The key point is that the output intensity — the light falling on a given sensor pixel, say — does not, in general, depend just on that in the input region sitting above that part of the output surface, because the light will be gathered from a wider region of the input layer. The input–output relationship is, in other words, non-local. Think, for example, of how a lens will focus the light falling over all of it into a focal spot on the output layer.

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    Philip Ball

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Ball, P. The limits of flatness. Nat. Mater. 22, 148 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01471-x

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