Hyperbolic metamaterial as a tunable near-field spatial filter for the implementation of the active plasmon injection loss compensation scheme

Abstract: We present how to physically realize the auxiliary source described in the recently introduced active plasmon injection loss compensation scheme for enhanced near-field superlensing. Particularly, we show that the characteristics of the auxiliary source described in the active plasmon injection scheme including tunable narrow-band and selective amplification via convolution can be realized by using a hyperbolic metamaterial functioning as a near-field spatial filter. Besides loss compensation, the proposed near-field spatial filter can be useful for real-time high resolution edge detection.