Energy and information flow in superlensing

TL;DR

This paper investigates how reflected waves influence energy and information transfer in superlenses, revealing trade-offs between image quality and transfer rate, and how dissipation affects energy flux.

Contribution

It demonstrates the critical role of reflected evanescent waves in energy transfer and analyzes how recording devices and dissipation impact image quality and flux in superlensing.

Findings

Reflected evanescent waves are essential for energy transfer in superlenses.

Introduction of recording devices can deteriorate image quality due to phase shifts.

Energy flux depends non-monotonically on dissipation levels.

Abstract

In the superlens problem, the presence of the reflected wave plays a critical role in the energy and information transfer from the object to recording device: both incident and reflected evanescent waves are required to insure nonzero energy/information flux from the object to the recorder. Therefore an optimization is required between the image quality (characterized by a transfer function) and information transfer rate (characterized by the energy/information flux). It is shown that the introduction of the recording device may lead to the deterioration in the image quality as compared to the ideal case when no recording device is present. The decline in the image quality is due to the generation of phase-shifted reflected evanescent wave between the lens and the recorder. It is also shown that the magnitude of the energy flux depends on the amount of dissipation in the lens and the recorder in a non-monotonous way.