Negative Refractive Lens (NRL) has shown that an optical system can produce images with details below the classic Abbe diffraction limit. This optical system transmits the electromagnetic fields, emitted by an object plane, towards an image plane producing the same field distribution in both planes. In particular, a Dirac delta electric field in the object plane is focused without diffraction limit to the Dirac delta electric field in the image plane. Two devices with positive refraction, the Maxwell Fish Eye lens (MFE) and the Spherical Geodesic Waveguide (SGW) have been claimed to break the diffraction limit using positive refraction with a different meaning. In these cases, it has been considered the power transmission from a point source to a point receptor, which falls drastically when the receptor is displaced from the focus by a distance much smaller than the wavelength. Although these systems can detect displacements up to λ/3000, they cannot be compared to the NRL, since the concept of image is different. The SGW deals only with point source and drain, while in the case of the NRL, there is an object and an image surface. Here, it is presented an analysis of the SGW with defined object and image surfaces (both are conical surfaces), similarly as in the case of the NRL. The results show that a Dirac delta electric field on the object surface produces an image below the diffraction limit on the image surface.

Date Published: 18 December 2012
PDF: 14 pages
Proc. SPIE 8550, Optical Systems Design 2012, 855012 (18 December 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.981190

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8550:
Optical Systems Design 2012
Laurent Mazuray; Daniel G. Smith; Jean-Luc M. Tissot; Tina E. Kidger; Frank Wyrowski; Stuart David; Rolf Wartmann; Jeffrey M. Raynor; Andrew P. Wood; Pablo Benítez; Andreas Erdmann; Marta C. de la Fuente, Editor(s)