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The new superlens can produce a much sharper image than a conventional lens because it is able to focus the “near-field” components of the transmitted light (red line in top image). The object in this case is the light transmitted through the word “NANO” that has been etched on a metal mask. Image: Cheng Sun, UC Berkeley. The graph below shows the improvement in the resolution of the letter “A” using the lens (blue line) as opposed to not having the superlens (red).