  An experimental evidence of subwavelength imaging with a "lens", which is a
uniaxial negative permittivity wire medium slab, is reported. The slab is
formed by gratings of long thin parallel conducting cylinders. Taking into
account the anisotropy and spatial dispersion in the wire medium we
theoretically show that there are no usual plasmons that could be exited on
surfaces of such a slab, and there is no resonant enhancement of evanescent
fields in the slab. The experimentally observed clear improvement of the
resolution in the presence of the slab is explained as filtering out the
harmonics with small wavenumbers. In other words, the wire gratings (the wire
medium) suppress strong traveling-mode components increasing the role of
evanescent waves in the image formation. This effect can be used in near-field
imaging and detection applications.
