Full-field subwavelength imaging using a scattering superlens

Abstract

Light-matter interaction gives optical microscopes tremendous versatility compared with other imaging methods such as electron microscopes, scanning probe microscopes, or x-ray scattering where there are various limitations on sample preparation and where the methods are inapplicable to bioimaging with live cells. However, this comes at the expense of a limited resolution due to the diffraction limit. Here, we demonstrate a novel method utilizing elastic scattering from disordered nanoparticles to achieve subdiffraction limited imaging. The measured far-field speckle fields can be used to reconstruct the subwavelength details of the target by time reversal, which allows full-field dynamic super-resolution imaging. The fabrication of the scattering superlens is extremely simple and the method has no restrictions on the wavelength of light that is used.