2009/06/25 by Weiguo Yang, Yang, Weiguo, John O. Schenk +3
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Classical Physics (physics.class-ph) #Electromagnetic Scattering and Analysis #FOS: Physical sciences #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Near-Field Optical Microscopy #Optics (physics.optics)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0906.4585
openalex publication_date 2009/06/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We reconsider the refraction of evanescent waves at an interface between air and negative index medium under the assumption that negative index medium is necessarily dispersive and lossy. We show that all evanescent waves in air will be refracted into decaying propagating waves inside a negative index medium, with different spatial frequency components having different propagation directions which are separated both in time and space; hence no refocus of these evanescent waves is possible. Accordingly, all information encoded by evanescent waves will be lost in the image making sub-diffraction-limited imaging impossible.