Magnifying Superlens in the Visible Frequency Range

Abstract

Optical microscopy is an invaluable tool for studies of materials and biological entities. With the current progress in nanotechnology and microbiology imaging tools with ever increasing spatial resolution are required. However, the spatial resolution of the conventional microscopy is limited by the diffraction of light waves to a value of the order of 200 nm. Thus, viruses, proteins, DNA molecules and many other samples are impossible to visualize using a regular microscope. The new ways to overcome this limitation may be based on the concept of superlens introduced by J. Pendry [1]. This concept relies on the use of materials which have negative refractive index in the visible frequency range. Even though superlens imaging has been demonstrated in recent experiments [2], this technique is still limited by the fact that magnification of the planar superlens is equal to 1.In this communication we introduce a new design of the magnifying superlens and demonstrate it in the experiment. Our design has some common features with the recently proposed "optical hyperlens" [3], "metamaterial crystal lens" [4], and the plasmon-assisted microscopy technique [5]. The internal structure of the magnifying superlens is shown in Fig

Super-Resolution Fluorescence Microscopy

“…Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) acquires an image by scanning a sharp probe tip across the sample, typically providing a resolution of 20–50 nm (9–11). Wide-field imaging has also been recently demonstrated in the near-field regime using a super lens with negative refractive index (12, 13). However, the short range of the near-field region (tens of nanometers) compromises the ability of light microscopy to look into a sample, limiting the application of near-field microscopy to near-surface features only.…”

Hyperbolic metamaterials: new physics behind a classical problem

“…This case has been utilized in the new type of optical imaging device, often called hyperlens. The concept of the hyperlens, suggesting a far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit, was first introduced in [13,14] and experimentally realized in [15,16]. In the hyperlenses light propagates along the optical axis of the hyperbolic anisotropic structure due to very small critical angle.…”

Metamaterials

“…This transmission occurs by way of channeling the source images radially away from the sources, in a manner akin to that of the resonance cones studied in anisotropic TL metamaterials (48). The so-called far-field "magnifying superlens" or "hyperlens" has been realized and has successfully verified far-field resolution of sub-wavelength details (75,76).…”