New "Hyperlens" Could Make Ordinary Microscopes Obsolete

It has been named "far-field hyperlens." This new magnifying glass is designed to increase the human sight abilities by increasing light's own abilities to image and magnify submicroscopic objects such as the components of biological cells.

This is no ordinary lens. The interesting thing about it is the fact that it will be able to project an image far away (thus the name "far-field") and capture details smaller than the wavelength of the illuminating light.

The wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a wave pattern, the distance between the midpoints of the wave, usually measured in microns.

For instance, visible light has wavelengths of less than one micrometer, typically 500 nanometers for green light.

Due to the cylindrical shape of the hyperlens, it can pick up components of the light waves that are usually lost in an ordinary lens and moreover, it's the same geometry that allows it to magnify an object's image.

The theoretical work on the "far-field hyperlens" has been conducted by a group of researchers at Pinceton University, led by Evgenii Narimanov.

The lens itself will have to be built using metamaterials, these being the only method of imbuing a common magnifying lens with extraordinary properties. When built, it would resolve details as small as 70 nanometers.

Metamaterials are artificially engineered to gain special properties, coming from their structure rather than directly from their composition. They usually can't be found in nature and have been built for use in electromagnetism (especially optics and photonics), where they are promising for a variety of optical and microwave applications, such as new types of beam steerers, modulators, band-pass filters, lenses, microwave couplers and antenna radomes.

However, there is one such material found in nature: opal. It's made of tiny cristobalite (metastable silica) spheres, and it's a visible light metamaterial. It's also a precious gem that's not so easy to obtain and it's bot cheap enough to be used on large scale applications.