Abstract
We study the influences of the graded index on Pendry’s perfect lens. A perfect lens, in its idealized case, is a slab of material with both the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability being -1. In the graded-index lens discussed here the , as well as , gradually changes from -1 in the main body of the slab to in the vacuum. During this process of changing, the will inevitably touch the zero value, which introduces singularities in the corresponding wave equations. We analytically discuss the imaging properties of the graded-index lens by use of confluent hypergeometric Kummer functions and discover that the limit of resolution of the lens has a logarithmic dependence on the graded-index regions. This logarithmic dependence implies that the hyper resolution of a “perfect” lens can only be obtained if the negative-to-positive transition layers are exponentially thin compared with the wavelength as well as the thickness of the lens. Similar effects in a metal slab lens are also discovered.
© 2016 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Yulu Chen, Yu-Chun Hsueh, Mengren Man, and Kevin J. Webb
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 33(3) 445-451 (2016)
Abhinav Bhardwaj and S. Anantha Ramakrishna
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 33(9) 2000-2009 (2016)
Giuseppe D'Aguanno, Nadia Mattiucci, and Mark J. Bloemer
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 25(2) 236-246 (2008)