2016/06/09 by Weng-Kian Tham, Weng Kian Tham, Hugo Ferretti +1 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Computer science #Digital Holography and Microscopy #Estimator #Fisher information #Image Processing Techniques and Applications #Mathematics #Optics #Physics #Rayleigh scattering #Statistical physics #Statistics #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.118.070801
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 070801 (2017)
arxiv created 2016/06/09 · openalex publication_date 2017/02/15 · arxiv updated 2017/02/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Every imaging system has a resolution limit, typically defined by Rayleigh's criterion. Given a fixed number of photons, the amount of information one can gain from an image about the separation between two sources falls to zero as the separation drops below this limit, an effect dubbed "Rayleigh's curse." Recently, in a quantum-information-inspired proposal, Tsang and co-workers found that there is, in principle, infinitely more information present in the full electromagnetic field in the image plane than in the intensity alone, and suggested methods for extracting this information and beating the Rayleigh limit. In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate a simple scheme that captures most of this information, and show that it has a greatly improved ability to estimate the distance between a pair of closely separated sources, achieving near-quantum-limited performance and immunity to Rayleigh's curse.