Inverse Design of Aberration-Corrected Hybrid Metalenses for Large Field of View Thermal Imaging Across the Entire Longwave Infrared Atmospheric Window

Long wave infrared (LWIR) cameras play a pivotal role across diverse applications due to their distinctive features. The growing demand for high-performance thermal imaging optics, characterized by a broad working bandwidth, large field of view (FOV), aberration-free design, lightweight construction, compactness, and cost-effectiveness, poses significant challenges for LWIR lens design. Here, we propose an inverse design method for LWIR hybrid metalenses, specifically aiming to achieve aberration-corrected thermal imaging with both a large FOV and a broad working bandwidth. Our approach involves optimizing phase profiles of metalens’ unit cells guided by a loss function that compares the hybrid lens design to diffraction-limited results for various incident angles and wavelengths. As a result, we demonstrate an aberration-corrected thermal camera with a 30° FOV and an achromatic working bandwidth spanning the entire LWIR atmospheric window (8 to 14 μm). Significantly, the total optical path length, the entrance pupil to the sensor plane of the charge-coupled device (CCD), is a mere 13.6 mm. Our work merits advantages in the FOV, working bandwidth, and compactness, which surpass state-of-the-art LWIR hybrid metalens designs and find numerous imaging and sensing applications.