Subwavelength electromagnetic near-field imaging of point dipole with metamaterial nanoslab

We investigate near-field imaging of a point dipole by a lossy, nanoscale metamaterial slab. Making use of the electromagnetic angular-spectrum representation, we derive the Green tensor for the field transmission through the metamaterial slab, duly considering multiple reflections, polarizations, and wave-vector signs. With this general formalism, we calculate the point-spread function of the imaging system, which enables us to assess, for instance, resolution and image brightness. Our results demonstrate that with the metamaterial-slab lens one achieves resolution beyond the conventional diffraction limit of half the wavelength. In general, the resolution and image brightness are degraded when the slab thickness and absorption increase, but we show that in some cases the resolution is rather insensitive to the magnitude of the losses in the metamaterial.