Negative index material is expected to exhibit interesting optical properties. Especially, superlens effect, which is predicted by John B. Pendry in 2000, is very attractive to overcome the diffraction limit in optical imaging [1]. Although there is no negative index material in nature, Pendry numerically suggested that several metals, only dielectric constant is negative at optical frequencies, behave like a superlens under the electrostatic limit and for the p-polarized fields. X. Zhang experimentally demonstrated this superlens effect by constructing nanolithography system with silver thin film in 2005 [2].

In this presentation, we newly propose a sub-wavelength imaging system at optical frequency regime in an array of metallic nanorods [3]. The near-field components of dipole sources were plasmonically transferred through the rod array to reproduce the image of the dipoles in the other side.

We calculated the field distribution at the different planes of imaging process using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm and found that the spatial resolution was 40 nm, which was much beyond the diffraction-limit and was limited by the array pitch. The typical configuration is a hexagonal arrangement with 40 nm periodicity of silver rods of 50 nm height and 20 nm diameter. The image formation highly depends on the coherence and the polarization of the dipole sources, array pitch, and the source-array distance. The principle of our near-field imaging is based on the longitudinal resonance of the localized surface plasmon along a metallic nanorod. The spectral responses of the device are also investigated.