The meta-lens research at Professor Junsuk Rho's Lab of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering is attracting worldwide attention as they attempt to design and manipulate the lens surface on a nanoscale which allows it to behave just like a traditional glass lens while significantly reducing the size. Their research has frequently appeared in Nature and Science. His team plans to commercialize their meta-lens technology by developing a large-scale electron beam lithography process – which is immensely costly and backed by POSCO’s annual funding. (Electron Beam Lithography, or EBL, is a process of shooting concentrated beams of electrons on electron-sensitive film to carve out custom shapes on the surface.)
On April 27, the executive members of POSCO organized a dinner event at the CHANGeUP GROUND rooftop to share the team’s first-year progress and to acknowledge the researchers’ current achievements and the great effort that they will continue to make over the next decade. In July 2020, POSCO Holdings, POSTECH, and RIST launched a joint research program integrating academia [POSTECH], a research institute [RIST], and industry [POSCO] which would create the synergy needed to develop, prototype, and register patents of future technologies. The joint research program rolled out a funding scheme last year, and Prof. Rho and his team have been selected as the first team to receive annual funding of 1 billion KRW for a decade.
Prof. Rho at the event introduced the world’s first EBL equipment that could print a relatively large area of meta-surface. The current bottleneck, however, is the lengthy duration of time – it requires more than a day to print a mere 1 mm2 of surface – which acts as the main barrier towards commercialization. Researchers from RIST and Prof. Rho’s team are now focused on developing the next-generation EBL equipment that could churn out meta-surfaces just as how books in the past were stamped with inked woodblocks. This breakthrough will unlock the key to the world’s first mass production of meta-surfaces. From the event’s motto “Today’s research, Tomorrow’s Business”, the ultimate goal of the program was yet again made clear – the aforementioned large-scale commercialization of the meta-lens.
Optical lenses are omnipresent and indispensable components in cameras, VR, AR, medical and LIDAR devices. Thus, the team’s vision of scaling down the lens size, once realized, will bring about profound revolutions in many areas such as autonomous vehicle technology, metaverse technology, and medical science.
The head of the joint research program Park Seong-Jin expressed his pride and gratitude by saying “The research at Rho's lab has great potential to lead the world in the field of photonics and will pave the road for the future of the POSCO group.” Prof. Rho also remarked: “Tech-Giants like Google, Apple, and Samsung are also conducting their meta-lens research, but we [Rho’s Team] have achieved outcomes that they are not yet able to; we should be proud of our feat.”