Abstract:
We show that a cylindrical lensing system composed of two metasurfaces with suitably tailored non-Hermitian
(i.e., with distributed gain and loss) and nonlocal (i.e., spatially dispersive) properties can perform magnified
imaging with reduced aberrations. More specifically, we analytically derive the idealized surface-impedance
values that are required for “perfect” magnification and imaging and elucidate the role and implications of non-
Hermiticity and nonlocality in terms of spatial resolution and practical implementation. For a basic demonstration,
we explore some proof-of-principle quasilocal and multilayered implementations and independently validate the
outcomes via full-wave numerical simulations. We also show that the metasurface frequency-dispersion laws
can be chosen so as to ensure unconditional stability with respect to arbitrary temporal excitations. These
results, which extend previous studies on planar configurations, may open intriguing venues in the design of
metastructures for field imaging and processing.