I don't know of any experiments with "real" negative-index-materials. The material in these "lenses" has a positive index, but since they have a periodic structure with a period close to the wavelength of the light they behave as being negative-index. These meta-materials are often called "Photonic crystals". The effect of the negative index is that rays are bent "the wrong way" such that rays from a single point refocus at the same distance within the crystal and hence create the 1:1 image. It's very much like a grating, only a very complicated 2D or 3D grating.
Now I'm getting into deep waters, but I don't think that you get super-resolution (better than the wavelength of the light) unless image is close enough to be within region where the evanescent waves still exist.
I'm not saying that superlensing is a bad thing, it is still very cool for situations where you don't want magnification. In lithography you could for instance image a very high res mask with 100nm lines onto a the silicon chip that you want to process. The very high res mask in turn can be manufactured using electron beam lithography which already has a resolution much better than 100 nm (but is too expensive for anything else than the masks).
It could also be used as a "lens" between a fiber end and a waveguide. Unlike normal lenses, the lateral position of super-lenses doesn't matter, so you would not have to align the superlens very accurately. Alignment of single-mode fibers is normally very expensive and probably accounts for most of the cost in making single-mode fiber equipment, so alignment free "lenses" would be a great thing.
Being a grad student in these kind of things (optics) I just want to clarify that these super-"lenses" do not behave at all like normal lenses. Most importantly, it is impossible to obtain magnification, the image will always be exactly the same size as the object. So it's not really fair to think about them as "lenses".
A very similar thing is dispersion compensation in fiber-optical communications where the dispersion of one fiber is compensated in another with dispersion of opposite sign. This way, a signal can go through the two fibers without being distorted by the chromatic dispersion. Dispersion and diffraction (i.e. free space light propagation)are mathematically virtually the same thing, and the negative-index material is equivalent to having a fiber with dispersion of the opposite sign. So perhaps it's more right to think about the super.lenses as "diffraction-compensators"?
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I don't know of any experiments with "real" negative-index-materials. The material in these "lenses" has a positive index, but since they have a periodic structure with a period close to the wavelength of the light they behave as being negative-index. These meta-materials are often called "Photonic crystals". The effect of the negative index is that rays are bent "the wrong way" such that rays from a single point refocus at the same distance within the crystal and hence create the 1:1 image. It's very much like a grating, only a very complicated 2D or 3D grating.
Now I'm getting into deep waters, but I don't think that you get super-resolution (better than the wavelength of the light) unless image is close enough to be within region where the evanescent waves still exist.
I'm not saying that superlensing is a bad thing, it is still very cool for situations where you don't want magnification. In lithography you could for instance image a very high res mask with 100nm lines onto a the silicon chip that you want to process. The very high res mask in turn can be manufactured using electron beam lithography which already has a resolution much better than 100 nm (but is too expensive for anything else than the masks). It could also be used as a "lens" between a fiber end and a waveguide. Unlike normal lenses, the lateral position of super-lenses doesn't matter, so you would not have to align the superlens very accurately. Alignment of single-mode fibers is normally very expensive and probably accounts for most of the cost in making single-mode fiber equipment, so alignment free "lenses" would be a great thing.
Being a grad student in these kind of things (optics) I just want to clarify that these super-"lenses" do not behave at all like normal lenses. Most importantly, it is impossible to obtain magnification, the image will always be exactly the same size as the object. So it's not really fair to think about them as "lenses".
A very similar thing is dispersion compensation in fiber-optical communications where the dispersion of one fiber is compensated in another with dispersion of opposite sign. This way, a signal can go through the two fibers without being distorted by the chromatic dispersion. Dispersion and diffraction (i.e. free space light propagation)are mathematically virtually the same thing, and the negative-index material is equivalent to having a fiber with dispersion of the opposite sign. So perhaps it's more right to think about the super.lenses as "diffraction-compensators"?