Sub-Rayleigh imaging via speckle illumination

Abstract

We demonstrate sub-Rayleigh limit imaging of an object via speckle illumination. Imaging beyond the conventional Rayleigh limit is achieved by illuminating the object with pseudothermal light that exhibits a random speckle pattern. An object image is reconstructed from the second-order correlation measurement and the resolution of the image, which exceeds the Rayleigh limit, is shown to be related to the size of the speckle pattern that is tied to the lateral coherence length of the pseudothermal light.