Perfect compensation of absorption in metamaterials for diffraction-unlimited imaging

Abstract

To overcome the resolution limit of conventional optics, near field imaging techniques using a negative index flat lens (NIFL) have been previously developed that amplify the evanescent components of the incident field. Here, a technique is developed and demonstrated to compensate for losses in a non-ideal NIFL by determining the transfer function of the lens and subsequently applying the inverse to the unresolved raw image. The result is a compensated image with sub-diffraction-limited resolution.

7th International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics 2016, Non-Hermitian engineering in photonics, plasmonics and metamaterial, 25-28 July 2016, Malaga, Spain