Or maybe it looks more like a peacock? Either way, what you see above is really what's known as a hyperlens, a metamaterial-based composite allowing for imaging beyond the diffraction limit. For the first time, it will allow scientists to see (optically) at the scales of individual molecules, opening a whole new realm of super-tiny biology previously inaccessible to optical microscopes, including DNA strands and viruses.

The new hyperlens comes courtesy of electrical engineer Natalia Litchinitser and a team of researchers based at the University at Buffalo. Their work is published in the current Nature Communications.

The diffraction limit is a more or less fundamental lower limit on image resolution at very high magnifications, which has to do with the wave nature of light itself. If the size of an object to be imaged is smaller than half the wavelength of a light source, the result is that the image just kind of gets blurred out as it hits the lens of the microscope (or camera or telescope or whatever). When this blurring increases beyond the normal aberrations of the imaging system, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the target and the system itself.

Image: Litchinitser et al

The slinky lens works by capturing so-called evanescent waves, which are a lot like they sound. As light passes through some medium and encounters a boundary—light passing from air to water, for example, but any two media with different refractive indexes—some of it is reflected inward, where it becomes effectively "lost." The slinky's slinky-ness is actually a radial pattern of tiny slivers of gold, which act to convert decaying evanescent waves back into propagating waves—refocusing or recapturing them, in a sense.

The gold slivers work together to tweak what's known as "dialectric permittivity," which is a measure of how an electric field interacts or is resisted by free space.