Far-field super-resolution imaging with a planar hyperbolic metamaterial lens

¹ Key Laboratory of Terahertz Solid-State Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences - Shanghai 200050, China
² State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences - Shanghai 200050, China
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing 100049, China
⁴ Dept. of Illuminating Engineering and Light Sources, School of Information Science and Engineering, Fudan University - Shanghai 200433, China
⁵ Engineering Research Center of Advanced Lighting Technology, Fudan University, Ministry of Education Shanghai 200433, China

^(a) waylee@mail.sim.ac.cn
^(b) jccao@mail.sim.ac.cn

Received: 29 September 2013
Accepted: 21 December 2013

Abstract

We demonstrate that achieving the far-field super-resolution imaging can be realized by using a planar hyperbolic metamaterial lens (PHML), beyond the Fabry-Perot resonance condition. Although the thickness of the PHML is much larger than the wavelength, the PHML not only can transmit radiative waves and evanescent waves with high transmission, but also can collect all the waves in the image region having amplitudes of the same order of magnitude. We present a design for a PHML to realize the far-field super-resolution imaging, with a distance between the sources and the images 10 times larger than the wavelength. We show that the super-resolution of our PHML is robust against losses, and the PHML can be fabricated by periodic stacking of metal and dielectric layers.