Optical demonstration of a new principle of far-field microscopy

Abstract

A one-dimensional optical demonstration of a super-resolution phase-retrieval imaging method which does not require a holographic reference wave, is shown to be robust and relatively insensitive to defocus in the lens transfer function. The experiments employ a lens of small numerical aperture but the final specimen reconstruction, which is obtained in complex amplitude, greatly exceeds the Rayleigh resolution limit. The method has potentially important applications in electron microscopy where a similar gain in resolution would facilitate sub-angstrom resolution imaging via the microdiffraction plane of the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM).