Active plasmon injection scheme for subdiffraction imaging with imperfect negative index flat lens

We present an active physical implementation of the recently introduced plasmon injection loss compensation scheme for Pendry's non-ideal negative index flat lens in the presence of realistic material losses and signal-dependent noise. In this active implementation, we propose to use a physically convolved external auxiliary source for signal amplification and suppression of the noise in the imaging system. In comparison with the previous passive implementations of the plasmon injection scheme for subdiffraction- limited imaging, where an inverse filter post-processing is used, the active implementation proposed here allows for deeper subwavelength imaging far beyond the passive post-processing scheme by extending the loss compensation to even higher spatial frequencies. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America