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

Cryo‐fluorescence microscopy facilitates correlations between light and cryo‐electron microscopy and reduces the rate of photobleaching

“…Where fluorescent features, like microtubules, were separated well enough that their fluorescence signals convoluted with the LM point spread function did not overlap, we could identify individual tubes and correlate them with the cryo-EM image (Figs 3E and F, white arrowheads), providing images at <5 nm resolution of cellular regions chosen in the LM. Granted, there are now various LM techniques that beat the traditional resolution barrier imposed by the diffraction of light to visualize the location of selectively labelled features (Heintzmann & Ficz, 2006), such as nearfield microscopy (Baylis et al, 2007), structured illumination (Gustafsson, 2005) or LM superlenses (Liu et al, 2007;Smolyaninov et al, 2007), however, our correlative method uses commercially available tools and standard methods to provide information about cellular features in a near-native state at molecular resolution.…”

Van der Waals thin films of WTe2 for natural hyperbolic plasmonic surfaces

“…Hyperbolic plasmonic surfaces, whose iso-frequency contour in the wave vector space is a hyperbola, have been realized at visible 1 , mid-infrared 2 and microwave frequencies 3 in metasurfaces, created by artificial sub-wavelength structuring or self-assembling carbon nanotubes. This enables a series of potential applications for planar photonics 4,5 , including but not limited to nanoscale imaging 6,7 , negative refraction 1 and enhancement of spontaneous emission 8 . Since the observation of highly confined and tunable plasmons in graphene [9][10][11] , polaritons, especially plasmon polaritons 12 and phonon polaritons [13][14][15] in two-dimensional (2D) materials, have attracted substantial attention.…”

Structure and properties of electromagnetic metamaterials

“…6). This metamaterial "hyperlens" -so-called because of the hyperbolic shape of the dispersion relation in the layered medium -couples the near field of the object to the far field outside the lens, and has now been realized [15,16].…”

“…An improved version of this near-field lens can be made by dividing the metal into layers separated by a conventional dielectric [14]. The layered metamaterial formed in this way can be wrapped around into a cylinder or sphere to make a hyperlens that not only transfers a subwavelength image but also provides magnification [15,16].…”