Perfect imaging: they don't do it with mirrors

Transparent Perfect Mirror

A mirror that reflects light fully and yet is transparent appears paradoxical. Current so-called transparent or "one-way" mirrors are not perfectly reflective and thus can be distinguished from a standard mirror. Constructing a transparent "perfect" mirror has profound implications for security, privacy, and camouflage. However, such a hypothetical device cannot be implemented in a passive structure. We demonstrate here a transparent perfect mirror in a non-Hermitian configuration: an active optical cavity where a certain prelasing gain extinguishes Poynting's vector at the device entrance. At…

Perfect Single-Sided Radiation and Absorption without Mirrors

Highly directional radiation from photonic structures is important for many applications, including high power photonic crystal surface emitting lasers, grating couplers, and light detection and ranging devices. However, previous dielectric, few-layer designs only achieved moderate asymmetry ratios, and a fundamental understanding of bounds on asymmetric radiation from arbitrary structures is still lacking. Here, we show that breaking the 180$^\circ$ rotational symmetry of the structure is crucial for achieving highly asymmetric radiation. We develop a general temporal coupled-mode theory form…

Anti-mirror effect: A perfect lens brings a brighter feature

In this letter, we show that a perfect lens can be employed to make multiple objects appear like only one in the far field, leading to a new concept of illusion optics. Numerical simulations are performed to verify the functionalities for both passive and active objects. The conceptual device can be utilized to enhance the illumination brightness for both incoherent and coherent systems.

用于宽带完美传输的镜像对称无序系统的逆向设计

Inverse design of mirror-symmetric disordered systems for broadband perfect transmission

本文提出利用逆向设计优化对称无序介质以实现复杂系统中宽带完美波传输的框架，通过降低优化复杂度逐步实现从单一传输态到宽带准完美传输，并经数值模拟与微波波导实验验证，展现了先进波控制应用潜力。

Exact Optics: A unification of optical telescope design

A perfect focus telescope is one in which all rays parallel to the axis meet at a point and give equal magnification there. It is shown that these two conditions define the shapes of both primary and secondary mirrors. Apart from scale, the solution depends upon two parameters, $s$, which gives the mirror separation in terms of the effective focal length, and $K$, which gives the relative position of the final focus in that unit. The two conditions ensure that the optical systems have neither spherical aberration nor coma, no matter how fast the $f$ ratio. All known coma--free systems emerge a…

Comment on: Reply to comment on `Perfect imaging without negative refraction'

Whether or not perfect imaging is obtained in the mirrored version of Maxwell's fisheye lens is debated in the comment/reply sequence [Blaikie-2010njp, Leonhardt-2010njp] discussing Leonhardt's original paper [Leonhardt-2009njp]. Here we show that causal solutions can be obtained without the need for an "active localized drain", contrary to the claims in [Leonhardt-2010njp].