Theory of coherent active convolved illumination for superresolution enhancement

Abstract

Recently an optical amplification process called the plasmon injection scheme was introduced as an effective solution to overcoming losses in metamaterials. Implementations with near-field imaging applications have indicated substantial performance enhancements even in the presence of noise. This powerful and versatile compensation technique, which has since been renamed to a more generalized active convolved illumination, offers new possibilities of improving the performance of many previously conceived metamaterial-based devices and conventional imaging systems. In this work, we present the first comprehensive mathematical breakdown of active convolved illumination for coherent imaging. Our analysis highlights the distinctive features of active convolved illumination, such as selective spectral amplification and correlations, and provides a rigorous understanding of the loss compensation process. These features are achieved by an auxiliary source coherently superimposed with the object field. The auxiliary source is designed to have three important properties. First, it is correlated with the object field. Second, it is defined over a finite spectral bandwidth. Third, it is amplified over that selected bandwidth. We derive the variance for the image spectrum and show that utilizing the auxiliary source with the above properties can significantly improve the spectral signal-to-noise ratio and resolution limit. Besides enhanced superresolution imaging, the theory can be potentially generalized to the compensation of information or photon loss in a wide variety of coherent and incoherent linear systems including those, for example, in atmospheric imaging, time-domain spectroscopy, $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ symmetric non-Hermitian photonics, and even quantum computing.

revised, more details and references added

References in corpus (19)

• Dielectric Metasurfaces for Complete Control of Phase and Polarization with Subwavelength Spatial Resolution and High Transmission
• Past Achievements and Future Challenges in 3D Photonic Metamaterials
• Optical Hyperlens: Far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit
• Overcoming losses with gain in a negative refractive index metamaterial
• Optical gain removes absorption and increases resolution in a near-field lens
• Subwavelength edge detection through trapped resonances in waveguides
• Virtual Parity-Time Symmetry
• Reducing Ohmic Losses in Metamaterials by Geometric Tailoring
• Causality-based criteria for a negative refractive index must be used with care
• Plasmon Injection to Compensate and Control Losses in Negative Index Metamaterials
• Terahertz active spatial filtering through optically tunable hyperbolic metamaterials
• Dark-field hyperlens: Super-resolution imaging of weakly scattering objects
• Emerging Connections: Quantum and Classical Optics
• Enhanced superlens imaging with loss-compensating hyperbolic near-field spatial filter
• Bringing the 'perfect lens' into focus by near-perfect compensation of losses without gain media
• Can A Universal Quantum Cloner Be Used to Design an Experimentally Feasible Near-Deterministic CNOT Gate ?
• Hyperbolic metamaterial as a tunable near-field spatial filter for the implementation of the active plasmon injection loss compensation scheme
• Active plasmon injection scheme for subdiffraction imaging with imperfect negative index flat lens
• Toward The Universal Quantum Cloner Limit For Designing Compact Photonic CNOT Gate

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Experimental realization of the active convolved illumination imaging technique for enhanced signal-to-noise ratio