In 2007, Xiang Zhang and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley obtained several optical images of nanometer-scale objects with a resolution well above the theoretically determined diffraction limit.
Zhang’s associates built a hyperlens. So they called the optical device that made it possible to bypass the diffraction barrier. By the way, in this experiment, according to the authors of the work, it was equal to 260 nanometers, but physicists got excellent pictures of a pair of parallel wires, 35 nanometers thick each, separated by 150 nanometers (and the wires looked separate), and also – images of the letters O and N, made up of the same wires.
A hyperlens consists of a large number of very thin (less than wavelength) alternating layers of silver and aluminum oxides placed in the cavity of a half of a cylinder cut from quartz. When an object is illuminated, its image, obtained with the help of so-called “evanescent waves”, passes through the lens, gathering in its focus. In Xiang Zhang’s device, just behind the hyperlens, an ordinary lens captures the image and projects it onto a plane at a distance of one meter.
“Evanescent waves” (Latin evanescere means imperceptible) is an abstraction of theorists who believe in the wave nature of photons. In reality, these are photons that violate the laws of reflection when passing through the boundary of two media with different refractive indices. After all, photons are not reflected from a mathematical ideal plane. In general, photons are not reflected, but are captured by atoms, violate their topical, that is, their energetic position among the surrounding atoms and atoms immediately emit similar, but different photons when restoring their topical and energetic position. If the reflection of photons would be, as theorists of geometric optics believe, they would have to announce the discovery of photons stopped during a change in direction of motion …