Modeling and designing metallic superlens with metallic objects.

When the metallic near-field superlens is to image a planar object, which is itself metallic, such as that in the near-field lithography applications, the object nanometer features will act as the Hertzian dipole sources and launch homogeneous and evanescent waves. The imaging system can be modeled as a dielectric Fabry-Perot cavity with the two surface plasmon resonant mirrors. We show the expressions of the transfer function and optimize the imaging system configuration using the genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of the design is confirmed by the image intensity profile computed with the numerical finite difference in time domain method.