Single DNG Interface Makes a Better Perfect Lens

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a single interface between regular and double-negative media acts as a perfect lens, outperforming slab-based lenses by maintaining unbounded resolution even with imperfections, due to a Brewster mode.

Contribution

It reveals that a single DNG interface can serve as a superior perfect lens by exploiting a Brewster mode, unlike traditional slab-based designs.

Findings

Single DNG interface acts as a perfect lens with unbounded resolution.

Brewster mode excitation is key to perfect-lensing mechanism.

Performance remains high under loss and imperfections, unlike slab lenses.

Abstract

We show that a single-interface between regular and double-negative (DNG) media constitutes the core structure of a perfect lens and, furthermore, substantially outperforms the highly discussed DNG slab-based lens under imperfect conditions, maintaining unbounded resolution. We identify the perfect-lensing mechanism as the excitation of a Brewster (real improper) mode at the interface - a mode with a completely flat-band dispersion at media-matching conditions, perfectly transferring all incident waves including evanescent. A lossless DNG slab retains the single-interface perfect-lensing characteristics solely because such a Brewster mode excited at the front (input) slab interface merges in a non-interacting fashion with a confined surface-mode at the rear (output) - thereby preserving its original flat-band dispersion. While the single interface perfect lens retains its high resolution under loss, imperfect media-matching and off-resonance excitations, the DNG slab lens performance rapidly deteriorates under such conditions due to excitation of the symmetric and anti-symmetric slab surface-modes.