Xueji Wang and Ziyi Yang's recent paper featured among top downloads in Optica

Congratulations to Dr. Xueji Wang and Ziyi Yang for the feature of their recent paper on thermal imaging among the top downloads in Optica for the month of January. In this paper titled "Spinning metasurface stack for spectro-polarimetric thermal imaging", we introduce an approach for spectro-polarimetric decomposition by combining large-area stacked meta-optical devices with advanced computational imaging algorithms. The co-design of a stack of spinning dispersive metasurfaces along with compressive sensing and dictionary learning algorithms allows simultaneous spectral and polarimetric resolution without the need for bulky filter wheels or interferometers. Our spinning-metasurface-based spectro-polarimetric stack is compact (<10×10×10cm) and robust, and it offers a wide field of view (20.5°). We show that the spectral resolving power of our system substantially enhances performance in machine learning tasks such as material classification, a challenge for conventional panchromatic thermal cameras. Our approach represents a significant advance in the field of thermal imaging for a wide range of applications including heat-assisted detection and ranging (HADAR).