Perfect compensation of absorption in metamaterials for diffraction-unlimited imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to compensate for absorption losses in negative index flat lenses, enabling diffraction-unlimited imaging by applying inverse transfer functions to raw images.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique to counteract absorption in NIFLs, achieving super-resolution imaging beyond the diffraction limit.

Findings

Successful compensation of absorption losses in NIFLs

Achieved sub-diffraction-limited resolution in experimental images

Demonstrated the effectiveness of inverse transfer function correction

Abstract

To overcome the resolution limit of conventional optics, near field imaging techniques using a negative index flat lens (NIFL) have been previously developed that amplify the evanescent components of the incident field. Here, a technique is developed and demonstrated to compensate for losses in a non-ideal NIFL by determining the transfer function of the lens and subsequently applying the inverse to the unresolved raw image. The result is a compensated image with sub-diffraction-limited resolution.