title: Super Talbot effect in indefinite metamaterial.
abstract: The Talbot effect (or the self-imaging effect) can be observed for a periodic object with a pitch larger than the diffraction limit of an imaging system, where the paraxial approximation is applied. In this paper, we show that the super Talbot effect can be achieved in an indefinite metamaterial even when the period is much smaller than the diffraction limit in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional numerical simulations, where the paraxial approximation is not applied. This is attributed to the evanescent waves, which carry the information about subwavelength features of the object, can be converted into propagating waves and then conveyed to far field by the metamaterial, where the permittivity in the propagation direction is negative while the transverse ones are positive. The indefinite metamaterial can be approximated by a system of thin, alternating multilayer metal and insulator (MMI) stack. As long as the loss of the metamaterial is small enough, deep subwavelength image size can be obtained in the super Talbot effect.
authors.affiliation: Microsystems Engineering, Kate Gleason College of Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York 14623, USA. zhaolin.lu@rit.edu
authors.forename: Wangshi
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Xiaoyue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Zhaolin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Lu