Experimental Demonstration of Hyperbolic Metamaterial Assisted Illumination Nanoscopy

An optical metamaterial is capable of manipulating light in nanometer scale that goes beyond what is possible with conventional materials. Taking advantage of this special property, metamaterial-assisted illumination nanoscopy (MAIN) possesses tremendous potential to extend the resolution far beyond conventional structured illumination microscopy. Among the available MAIN designs, hyperstructured illumination that utilizes strong dispersion of a hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) is one of the most promising and practical approaches, but it is only theoretically studied. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the concept of hyperstructured illumination. A ∼80 nm resolution has been achieved in a well-known Ag/SiO₂ multilayer HMM system by using a low numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.5), representing a 6-fold resolution enhancement of the diffraction limit. The resolution can be significantly improved by further material optimization.