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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 6 April 2010, reviews electromagnetic and optical metamaterials for aerospace use. It was produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. The report covers super-lenses and hyper-lenses for imaging objects smaller than the diffraction limit, slowing light to shrink components, energy-harvesting absorbers, and one-way chiral devices. It concludes that metamaterials matter for aerospace because they allow smaller, lighter components.
“Nature”8 pages
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Despite the convenience of the near-field super-lens, (that is, its ability to transport the
image) it still requires an NSOM to read out the image. Within the confines of an
advanced aerospace platform such device (with its necessary auxiliaries) may not fit.
Therefore, one has to consider alternative metamaterials-based ideas for sub-diffraction
imaging. One such idea, the hyper-lens, has been proposed recently by two groups
(References 22-24 ), and already experimentally tested by another group (Reference
25). The principle of the hyper-lens is very simple: to use an indefinite permittivity
medium (sometimes referred to as the hyperbolic medium because the relationship
between the propagation wavenumbers and the frequency, also known as the constant
frequency contour, has a hyperbolic nature) in a tapered format. Several conceptual
implementations such as the spoke-like structure and the cylindrical multi-layer
structure (see Figure 7, left panel) have been suggested. The hyper-lens works on two
principles: (a) indefinite permittivity materials (of which the super-lens is one example)
are capable of propagating sub-diffraction waves, and (b) the expanding nature of the
hyper-lens can magnify images to the >../2 size, at which point they become observable
in a conventional microscope. One recent experimental implementation of the hyper-
lens in UV is shown in the right panel of Figure 7. The hyper-lens is made of 16 layers
of Ag/AhOJ. This specific hyper-lens was used for imaging a line pair object with line
width of 35 nm and spacing of 150 nm and was operated at Ji. =400 nm. The magnified
image (350 nm spacing) can be clearly resolved with an optical microscope [numerical
aperture (NA) = 1.4], thus demonstrating magnification and projection of a sub-
diffraction-limited image into the far field.
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Figure 7. Theoretical Concepts (left panel) and Experlmental Implementation (right panel) of an Optical
Hyper-lens Capable of Magnifying Sub-Diffraction Obje<:ts to Observable {larger than A/2) Size
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 27 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.