Theory of the far-field imaging beyond the Rayleigh limit based on the super-resonant lens

Abstract

Essentially, the idea of improving the resolution of a given imaging system is to enhance its information capacity represented usually by the temporal-bandwidth (or, spatial-spectrum) product. This letter introduces the concept of super-resonant lens, and demonstrates theoretically that the information capacity of a far-field imaging system can be efficiently driven up when three basic requirements are satisfied: the super-resonance, the near-field coupling between imaged objects and the used super-resonant lens, and the broadband illumination, which leads to the subwavelength image of imaged objects from far-field measurements. Furthermore, a single-view imaging scheme is proposed and examined for the far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit. This new approach will be a breakthrough in nanolithography, detection, sensing or sub-wavelength imaging in the near future.