Hyperbolic metamaterial as a tunable near-field spatial filter for the implementation of the active plasmon injection loss compensation scheme

TL;DR

This paper proposes using hyperbolic metamaterials as tunable near-field spatial filters to implement active plasmon injection schemes, enabling loss compensation and high-resolution edge detection in superlensing.

Contribution

It introduces a practical realization of the auxiliary source in active plasmon injection schemes using hyperbolic metamaterials as spatial filters.

Findings

Hyperbolic metamaterials can serve as tunable near-field filters.

The scheme enables loss compensation in superlensing.

Potential for real-time high-resolution edge detection.

Abstract

We present how to physically realize the auxiliary source described in the recently introduced active plasmon injection loss compensation scheme for enhanced near-field superlensing. Particularly, we show that the characteristics of the auxiliary source described in the active plasmon injection scheme including tunable narrow-band and selective amplification via convolution can be realized by using a hyperbolic metamaterial functioning as a near-field spatial filter. Besides loss compensation, the proposed near-field spatial filter can be useful for real-time high resolution edge detection.