Hyperbolic Metamaterial As A Tunable Near-Field Spatial Filter To Implement Active Plasmon-Injection Loss Compensation

We present how to physically realize the recently introduced active plasmon-injection loss compensation scheme. Particularly, we show that the characteristics of the auxiliary source described in the active plasmon-injection scheme, including tunable narrow band and selective amplification via convolution, can be realized by using a hyperbolic metamaterial functioning as a near-field spatial filter. Besides loss compensation, the proposed approach with the near-field spatial filter can be useful for enhanced near-field superlensing and real-time high-resolution edge detection.