Stacked wire media slabs: general theory with application to metamaterial hyperlenses

Abstract

Metamaterial hyperlenses are novel devices that utilize the unique dispersion properties of hyperbolic metamaterials to resolve subwavelength images. Stacked wire media hyperlenses have been shown to possess advantages over conventional wire media hyperlenses since they decouple the lens length from operating frequency, and broaden the operating bandwidth. We investigate these devices using both a transfer matrix method and tight binding approximation to find the modes in the effective medium regime. We then use semi-analytical and numerical techniques to find the limitations of the analytical model, and gain insight into the regime beyond these limits. We also investigate the modes of stacked WM slabs consisting of dielectric coated wires and discuss potential applications of such structures.

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Boris Kuhlmey and Dr Alexander Argyros for useful discussions, and Dr Björn Sturmberg for EMUstack support. Computational resources were provided by the NeCTAR Research Cloud, Australia.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council under the Discovery Project scheme [DP120103942]; the Centre of Excellence CUDOS [CE110001018].