Abstract

for my love Gemma In 2000, a controversial paper by John Pendry surmised that a slab of negative index material could act as a perfect lens, projecting images with resolution detail beyond the limits of conventional lensing systems. A thin silver slab was his realistic suggestion for a practical near-field superlens – a ‘poor-mans perfect lens’. The superlens relied on plasmonic resonances rather than negative refraction to provide imaging. This silver superlens concept was experimentally verified by the author using a novel near-field lithographic technique called Planar Lensing Lithography (PLL), an extension of a previously developed Evanescent Near-Field Optical Lithography (ENFOL) technique. This thesis covers the computational and experimental efforts to test the perfor-mance of a silver superlens using PLL, and to compare it with the results produced by ENFOL. The PLL process was developed by creating metal patterned conformable pho-tomasks on glass coverslips and adapting them for use with an available optical ex-