Refining the perfect lens

Some time ago it was shown that a slab of material with epsilon(t) = -1, mu(1) = -1 and suspended in vacuo has the ability to focus a perfect image: both the near-field and far-field components are delivered to the image plane with the correct amplitude and phase reproducing every detail in the original source [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000) 3966]. Real materials fall short of this ideal particularly with respect to losses which manifest themselves as imaginary components to epsilon(1) and mu(1). In this talk we shall examine how to minimise the restrictions by structuring the lens into a series of thin slices. This results in a novel mapping onto an anisotropic system which behaves like an optical fibre bundle, but operating on the near field. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.