Impact of surface roughness on the effective dielectric constants and subwavelength image resolution of metal–insulator stack lenses

The effective parallel and perpendicular dielectric constants for a multilayer metal–insulator stack are obtained from numerical simulations and compared with analytical homogenization results as a function of wavelength and number of periods. The influence of inevitable film surface roughness on the homogenized dielectric constants, determined from numerical scattered field calculations, is evaluated as a function of roughness. The impact of this roughness on resolution in a subwavelength imaging application gives smoothness guidelines for material deposition.