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Science 10 November 2000:
Vol. 290. no. 5494, p. 1066
DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5494.1066a
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News of the Week

THEORETICAL PHYSICS:
Offbeat Lenses Promise Perfect Fidelity

Charles Seife

A seemingly ineluctable property of any lens is that it cannot focus all wavelengths of light shed by a distant object. But now a British physicist has found an ingenious solution that lights the way to building a perfect "superlens." He calculated that light waves passing through a material with a negative refractive index--one in which light bends in the opposite direction from the way it bends on entering a glass lens--would reach the focal point intact, preventing any loss of resolution.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)