Regenerating evanescent waves from a silver superlens

We investigated a precursor of superlensing: regenerating evanescent waves by excitation of a surface plasmon. Because the permittivity of a silver slab approaches -1, we experimentally observed a broadening of surface-plasmon bandwidth. Our study identifies a means to access deep subwavelength features by use of a metamaterial superlens. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.