LAUSR

An optical metamaterial is capable of manipulating light in nanometer scale that goes beyond what is possible with conventional materials. Taking advantage of this special property, metamaterial-assisted illumination nanoscopy (MAIN) possesses tremendous potential to extend the resolution far beyond conventional structured illumination microscopy. Among the available MAIN designs, hyperstructured illumination that utilizes strong dispersion of a hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) is one of the most promising and practical approaches, but it is only theoretically studied. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the concept of hyperstructured illumination. A ∼80 nm resolution has been achieved in a well-known Ag/SiO2 multilayer HMM system by using a low numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.5), representing a 6-fold resolution enhancement of the diffraction limit. The resolution can be significantly improved by further material optimization.