Metamaterials and hyperlens for better than diffraction limited optics
http://www.azooptics.com/Details.asp?NewsID=4060
Red-light metamaterials
Metamaterials make it possible to manipulate light on the nanoscale. They are nanostructured materials made of tiny metallic rings, rods, or strips arranged in such a way as to produce a negative index of refraction, or a situation unique to metamaterials when light is deflected away from an imaginary line passing perpendicularly between air and the material. This property in turn is expected to lead to novel optical devices, such as flat-panel lenses and hyperlenses. These lenses can be used to image objects with a spatial resolution smaller than the wavelength of the illuminating light source, thus circumventing the normal "diffraction limit," which says that a lens cannot produce an image with a spatial resolution better than approximately half the wavelength of the light used to make the image.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/...86/1/Hyperlens
Xiang Zhang and colleagues at the University of California in Berkeley are one of two groups that have independently created the first truly magnifying "superlenses". In theory, superlenses should be able to surpass the fundamental resolution limit that plagues all conventional optics by capturing special light waves that exist close to illuminated surfaces. However, until now superlenses had only been able to focus these waves, and not – crucially – magnify them.
The schematic below depicts Zhang's "hyperlens", which is another term for a superlens that spreads light in a hyperbolic shape. As light illuminates the lens, it is scattered off the inscribed object on the surface. Once the light enters, the nano-scale "metamaterial" structure guides the beams outward, forcing one component of the momentum to be compressed. By the time the light leaves the lens, it has been sufficiently magnified and "converted" so that it can travel up to a metre farther – far enough for a conventional microscope to pick up.
http://images.iop.org/objects/physic.../Hyperlens.jpg