Perfect imaging: they don't do it with mirrors

Imaging with a spherical mirror in empty space is compared with the case when the mirror is filled with the medium of Maxwell's fish eye. Exact time-dependent solutions of Maxwell's equations show that perfect imaging is not achievable with an electrical ideal mirror on its own, but with Maxwell's fish eye in the regime when it implements a curved geometry for full electromagnetic waves

Perfect drain for the Maxwell Fish Eye lens.

Perfect imaging of electromagnetic waves using the Maxwell fish eye (MFE) requires a new concept: a point called the perfect drain that we shall call the perfect point drain. From the mathematical point of view, a perfect point drain is just like an ideal point source, except that it drains power from the electromagnetic field instead of generating it. We introduce here the perfect drain for the MFE as a dissipative region of non-zero size that completely drains the power from the point source. To accomplish this goal, the region must have a precise complex permittivity that depends on its size as well as on the frequency. The perfect point drain is obtained when the diameter of the perfect drain tends to zero. This interpretation of the perfect point drain is connected well with common concepts of electromagnetic theory, opening up both modeling in computer simulations and experimental verification of setups containing a perfect point drain

Subwavelength imaging with materials of in-principle arbitrarily low index contrast

Perfect imaging with Maxwell's fish eye opens the exciting prospect of passive imaging systems with a resolution no longer limited by the wave nature of light. But it also challenges some of the accepted wisdom of super-resolution imaging and therefore has been subject to controversy and discussion. Here we describe an idea for even simpler perfect-imaging systems based on geometrical optics and prove by experiment that it works.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe