The past decade has seen an intensive effort to achieve optical imaging resolution beyond the diffraction limit. Apart from the Pendry-Veselago negative index superlens, implementation of which in optics faces challenges of losses and as yet unattainable fabrication finesse, other super-resolution approaches necessitate the lens either to be in the near proximity of the object or manufactured on it, or work only for a narrow class of samples, such as intensely luminescent or sparse objects. Here we report a new super-resolution microscope for optical imaging that beats the diffraction limit of conventional instruments and the recently demonstrated near-field optical superlens and hyperlens. This non-invasive subwavelength imaging paradigm uses a binary amplitude mask for direct focusing of laser light into a subwavelength spot in the post-evanescent field by precisely tailoring the interference of a large number of beams diffracted from a nanostructured mask. The new technology, which--in principle--has no physical limits on resolution, could be universally used for imaging at any wavelength and does not depend on the luminescence of the object, which can be tens of micrometres away from the mask. It has been implemented as a straightforward modification of a conventional microscope showing resolution better than λ/6.

Super-oscillatory optical lenses have recently been shown to achieve subwavelength focusing and have been used for super-resolution imaging. However, the subwavelength hotspots created by these lenses are always accompanied by sidebands containing a significant fraction of the optical energy and are highly localised in the axial direction. Here, we report a class of super-oscillatory lenses that form extended subwavelength optical needles on a 15λ field of view.

In the recent years, metasurfaces, being flat and lightweight, have been designed to replace bulky optical components with various functions. We demonstrate a monolithic Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) integrated with a metasurface-based flat lens that focuses light in the mid-infrared spectrum. A two-dimensional scanning MEMS platform controls the angle of the lens along the two orthogonal axes (tip-tilt) by ±9 degrees, thus enabling dynamic beam steering. The device can compensate for off-axis incident light and thus correct for aberrations such as coma. We show that for low angular displacements, the integrated lens-on-MEMS system does not affect the mechanical performance of the MEMS actuators and preserves the focused beam profile as well as the measured full width at half maximum. We envision a new class of flat optical devices with active control provided by the combination of metasurfaces and MEMS for a wide range of applications, such as miniaturized MEMS-based microscope systems, LIDAR scanners, and projection systems.

Planar optical lenses are fundamental elements of miniaturized photonic devices. However, conventional planar optical lenses are constrained by the diffraction limit in the optical far-field due to the band-limited wavevectors supported by free-space and loss of high-spatial-frequency evanescent components. As inspired by Einstein's radiation ‘needle stick', electromagnetic energy can be delivered into an arbitrarily small solid angle. Such sub-diffraction optical needles have been numerically investigated using diffractive optical elements (DOEs) together with specially polarized optical beams, but experimental demonstration is extremely difficult due to the bulky size of DOEs and the required alignment precision. Planar super-oscillatory lenses (SOLs) were proposed to overcome these constraints and demonstrated that sub-diffraction focal spots can actually be formed without any evanescent waves, making far-field, label-free super-resolution imaging possible. Here we extend the super-oscillation concept into the vectorial-field regime to work with circularly polarized light, and experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, a circularly polarized optical needle with sub-diffraction transverse spot size (0.45λ) and axial long depth of focus (DOF) of 15λ using a planar SOL at a violet wavelength of 405 nm. This sub-diffraction circularly polarized optical needle has potential applications in circular dichroism spectroscopy, super-resolution imaging, high-density optical storage, heat-assisted magnetic recording, nano-manufacturing and nano-metrology.