Optical-image transfer through a diffraction-compensating metamaterial

Cancellation of optical diffraction is an intriguing phenomenon enabling optical fields to preserve their transverse intensity profiles upon propagation. In this work, we introduce a metamaterial design that exhibits this phenomenon for three-dimensional optical beams. As an advantage over other diffraction-compensating materials, our metamaterial is impedance-matched to glass, which suppresses optical reflection at the glass-metamaterial interface. The material is designed for beams formed by TM-polarized plane-wave components. We show, however, that unpolarized optical images with arbitrary shapes can be transferred over remarkable distances in the material without distortion. We foresee multiple applications of our results in integrated optics and optical imaging. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America