Abstract
Resolution is crucially important for optical imaging, which defines the smallest spatial feature of object that can be delivered by light wave. However, due to the wave nature of light, optical imaging is of limited resolution, widely known as Rayleigh limit or Abbe limit. Nevertheless, this limit can be overcome by considering the loopholes in the derivation of the Rayleigh limit, such as light–matter interaction, structured illumination, and near-field interference. In contrast to the conventional single-photon interference, multi-photon amplitudes responsible for optical high-order interference could be designed to possess a reduced effective wavelength, enabling the breakthrough of the Rayleigh limit. In this review, we will present recently developed super-resolution imaging schemes based on optical high-order interference, and discuss future perspectives.
Highlights
Optical imaging is important for fundamental research and practical applications, prompting advances in our society
To break the Rayleigh limit for acquiring smaller spatial features of an object, extensive efforts have been made, leading to several milestone achievements that have already achieved a great success in many applications, such as stimulated emission depletion (STED) [2], structured illumination microscopy (SIM) [3], photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) [4], and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) [5]
The results show that the imaging resolution increases with the increase of the order of autocorrelation measurement, demonstrating the n-scaling of standard quantum limit (SQL) super-resolution imaging as shown Figure 3F–H
Summary
Optical imaging is important for fundamental research and practical applications, prompting advances in our society. Much effort has been devoted to realizing superresolution in direct imaging schemes, and several practically achievable schemes have been developed in conventional lens-assisted imaging schemes, as well as in newly designed imaging schemes [31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44] These far-field super-resolution imaging methods could be quite useful in many applications such as biological imaging [33,37], laser radar [32] and nano imaging [38], and attract a lot of interest. The paper is organized as follows: we will first give a brief introduction to the Rayleigh resolution limit with a lens-assisted imaging scheme, review the recently developed super-resolution imaging schemes based on optical high-order interference, and discuss future perspectives
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