Paper
On the Negative Index Perfect Lens with Loss
- Authors:
- Weiguo Yang; Michael A. Fiddy
- Abstract
- We revisit Pendry’s theory of the “perfect lens” made of a negative index material (NIM) slab and explicitly treat the situation of a lossy NIM. We show that the usual boundary conditions prohibit the situation of ideal lossless NIM where and . We further demonstrate that at the boundary of air and lossy NIM, all input evanescent waves will be refracted into decaying propagating waves inside the NIM, with different spatial frequency components having different propagation directions. Due to the different and non-zero real part of the propagation constant inside the lossy NIM, these high spatial frequency components will not all contribute constructively to the image formed inside the lossy NIM. Accordingly, the information contained in these high spatial frequency components will be lost, making sub-diffraction-limited imaging impossible inside the lossy NIM and in turn for the lossy NIM slab lens’ external image plane.
- Keywords
- Negative Refraction; Perfect Lens; Electro-Magnetic Boundary Conditions
- StartPage
- 122
- EndPage
- 126
- Doi