Near-field lenses in two dimensions

It has been shown that a slab of materials with refractive index n = −1 behaves like a perfect lens focusing all light to an exact electromagnetic copy of an object. The original lens is limited to producing images the same size as the object, but here we generalize the concept so that images can be magnified. For two-dimensional systems, over distances much shorter than the free space wavelength, we apply conformal transformations to the original parallel-sided slab generating a variety of new lenses. Although the new lenses are not ‘perfect’ they are able to magnify two-dimensional objects. The results apply equally to imaging of electric or magnetic sub-wavelength objects in two dimensions. The concepts have potential applications ranging from microwave frequencies to the visible.