

No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won’t usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the size of the smallest bacterium. Scanning electron microscopes can capture objects that are much smaller, about a nanometer wide, but they are expensive, heavy, and, at the size of a large desk, not very portable.

SuperlensTo build a superlens, you need metamaterials: artificial materials with properties not seen in nature. Scientists are beginning to fabricate metamaterials in their quest to make real seemingly magical phenomena like invisibility cloaks, quantum levitation—and superlenses.



Other researchers have also been able to sidestep the diffraction limit, but not throughout the entire spectrum of visible light. Guney’s model showed how metamaterials might be “stretched” to refract light waves from the infrared all the way past visible light and into the ultraviolet spectrum.


“It could also be applied to lithography,” the microfabrication process used in electronics manufacturing. “The lens determines the feature size you can make, and by replacing an old lens with this superlens, you could make smaller features at a lower cost. You could make devices as small as you like.”

Computer chips are made using UV lasers, which are expensive and difficult to build. “With this superlens, you could use a red laser, like the pointers everyone uses, and have simple, cheap machines, just by changing the lens.”


“The public’s access to high-powered microscopes is negligible,” he says. “With superlenses, everybody could be a scientist. People could put their cells on Facebook. It might just inspire society’s scientific soul.”

Guney and graduate student Muhammad Aslam published an article on their work, “Surface Plasmon Diven Scalable Low-Loss Negative-Index Metamaterial in the visible spectrum,” in Physical Review B, volume 84, issue 19.0


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