Metamaterials Will Make You GRIN

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Harold Gough
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Location: Reading, Berkshire, England

Metamaterials Will Make You GRIN

Post by Harold Gough »

My images are a medium for sharing some of my experiences: they are not me.

enricosavazzi
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Post by enricosavazzi »

I don't think we are going to see applications of metamaterials to photomacrography any time soon. These materials and their properties are very real, but there are a couple of main concerns with their applications to photomacrography or general-purpose photography (besides enormous difficulty in manufacturing superlenses, and the possibility of unanticipated show-stoppers that may put an end to these hopes).

Most of these effects are based on evanescent waves, which are electromagnetic waves that propagate from an object to only a small (nanoscale) distance away from it. Evanescent waves carry image information at a scale much lower than allowed by diffraction, and in principle can be used to break the "diffraction barrier". Beyond this maximum distance, this image information is lost. In practice, this means that a superlens must be built directly onto the subject, so we can forget about a telephoto or photomacrographic lens that includes one or more superlens elements.

A current workaround to this problem is also not useful in our context: a probe or illuminator with a nanoscale tip is scanned across the subject in a raster pattern, and also in this case the probe must be held at a nanoscale distance from the subject.

There is a current device that does not require a nanoscale distance from the subject: a very thin laser beam used to excite fluorescence in a subject can be surrounded with a slightly larger laser beam with a hollow core, of a different wavelength that suppresses fluorescence. The net result is that the fluorescing spot in the subject is much smaller than the excitation wavelength. Also in this case a scanning process must be used to create an image. The resulting image resolution is much finer than the Rayleigh criterion and Airy disk.
--ES

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