Physicists Close in on 'Superlens'

An anonymous reader writes "In Oregon, physicists have developed a material for creating a real superlens that in theory could attain a one-nanometer visual resolution. The idea is to use exotic materials to create "negative" refraction of light, which literally means steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world."

These would be nice!

[Z-95]

Could these be set up like a traditional light microscope to make a cheaper atom scanning microscope than the electron microscope? This could open an entirely new door in the study of atomic particles.

Negative Refraction

[HateBreeder]

I thought you can get negative refraction, when an electromagnetic wave passes through a "Metamaterial [darpa.mil]" i.e. One with Negative Permittivity and Permeability.

(for instnace, in a dispersive plasma cloud)

What about zone plates?

[agm]

I always thought that zone plates [wikipedia.org] ("lenses" that use diffraction instead of refraction) give a higher degree of accuracy a lower wavelengths. Zone plates are often used where a traditional lens is opaque to certain wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum.

E=MC^2, yo.

[PopeOptimusPrime]

In a conventional lens where refraction in 'positive', the light is bent because as it enters the lens it slows down.

Does this mean that in this 'superlens' light will speed up as it enters, traveling faster than the established speed of light?

Is that really possible?

[timerider]

I mean, how do you get 1nm visual resolution, when the wavelength of visual light ranges from 400-800 nm?

Re:E=MC^2, yo.

[wills4223]

Yes in fact the light is going faster then the speed of light in space however the laws of relativity still hold because information still can't be transmitted faster then c.

Its even stranger...

[imsabbel]

Light gets faster if the refraction index is between 0 and 1. For example x-rays in most forms of condensed matter.
A negative index of refraction would strickly speaking mean the photons are moving backwards when entering...

Better links

[ortholattice]

The original press release (no ads): http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2005/Dec0 5/optics.htm [oregonstate.edu]

The actual paper (PDF file): http://www.physics.oregonstate.edu/~vpodolsk/repri nts.pdf/resolut.apl2005.pdf [oregonstate.edu]

Re:Not lenses - diffraction compensators!

[johst]

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.

Re:These would be nice!

[Teclis]

FYI. Scanning tunneling electron microscopes do get atomic resolution. Scanning electron microscopes do not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_mi croscope [wikipedia.org]

mandatory Star Trek quote

[Ancient_Hacker]

"Captain, I canna change the laws of Physics!"

It would be wonderful if this super lens stuff was correctly explained in the article, BUT:

• I seem to recall light waves are one heck of a lot longer than a nanometer, like hundreds of times. Viewed as a particle, a photon is similarly huge. To put it into Enquirer-speak: You can't peek into the eye of a needle by throwing bowling balls at it.
• Regular lenses work by slowing down light. Is it likely that you can speed up light?
• One nanometer wavelength "light" is somewhere in the gamma-ray area. It's really hard to bend these. Even if you could, most target materials are semi-transparent at these wavelengths. Worse yet, that energy of photon is likely to disrupt whatever it's hitting. Not good for viewing things unless you get off on watching a lot of microscopic Terminator-style explosions.
• I seem to recall that a lens's resolving power is proportional to the lens width in wavelengths. How wide are these superlenses, and is that wide enough for nanometer resolution?
• If you did get that level of resolution, which seems mighty doubtful, what is the depth-of-field or width of field? It's not much fun looking through a drinking straw at really out-of-focus blobs.
• There are already a whole host of super-microscopes of the electron scanning and tunneling varieties.

All those caveats aside, it does soound really exciting!

So are we going to see this in UV?

[arodland]

If this can be applied to photolithography, we should be getting chips with feature sizes smaller than we can even deal with -- for the moment, anyway. I, for one, welcome our new 8-core, 1nm overlords.

Where's the beef?

[Clueless Nick]

What does the article have to offer on real details? Apart from saying that the scientists have "worked out an optimal configuration" for use with a "superlens", which provides "negative refraction", thus "maximizing the resolution" of the superlens concept, where is the real information I would like to set my teeth on?

There is no simple diagram showing how superlenses work. If they are bending light unnaturally, i.e. the other way, does this mean you will create convex lenses to see better detail?

What's a lay reader supposed to understand from this? The article makes broad statements, and some misstatements. Consider this: ""In a conventional lens, light gets bent as it moves through a curved material, such as glass". Doesn't light get bent as it passes through materials having different densities/refractive indices, regardless of the surface being flat or curved?

Anyway, it is from somebody's blog anyway, and seems to have been posted here to fish for funny comments, IMHO.

Re:These would be nice!

[phliar]

The new material that cause light to bend the other way probably means C is higher than C(vacuum).

No, c is the absolute limit. Nothing -- not even light -- can go faster than c. (It's lower-case c.) Perhaps you're confused about phase velocity [wikipedia.org]. (Also, if it were possible that the velocity of light in this material were higher than c, then its refractive index would be less than one, but never negative.)

I don't know what the original research actually was, but this article is crap. I can't understand what "steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world" is supposed to mean. What "direction" is this "steering" found in the real world? If he means refraction, it's easiest to think of it as light wanting to bend towards the medium in which it moves slower. (Nothing mysterious about it either -- imagine on the floor you have two regions, one hardwood and one carpet. Take apart a toy so you have two wheels on an axle, and roll it towards the wood/carpet border, but at an angle. As it crosses, it will turn towards the carpet.)

So, since (group) velocity > c is not possible, does he mean that he is making light bend away from the medium in which it moves slower? In other words, Einstein and everyone after him was just full of crap?