Multiscale analysis of subwavelength imaging with metal-dielectric multilayers

Imaging with a layered superlens is a spatial filtering operation characterized by the point spread function (PSF). We show that in the same optical system the image of a narrow subwavelength Gaussian incident field may be surprisingly dissimilar to the PSF, and the width of the PSF is not a straightforward measure of the resolution. The FWHM or standard deviation of the PSF gives ambiguous information about the actual resolution, and imaging of objects smaller than the FWHM of the PSF is possible. A multiscale analysis of imaging gives good insight into the peculiar scale-dependent properties of subwavelength imaging.