Refining the Perfect Lens

JB Pendry and SA Ramakrishna

Abstract:

Some time ago it was shown that a slab of material with,

and suspended in vacuo, has the ability to focus a perfect image: both the near field and far field components are delivered to the image plane with the correct amplitude and phase reproducing every detail in the original source [1]. Real materials fall short of this ideal particularly in respect of losses which manifest themselves as imaginary components to and . In this talk we shall examine how to minimise the restrictions by structuring the lens into a series of thin slices. This results in a novel mapping onto an anisotropic system which behaves like an optical fibre bundle, but operating on the near field.

This paper is available as a PDF file.

last updated Tuesday 24 February 2004 by JBP