Multi-lobe superoscillation and its application to structured illumination microscopy

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 27; no. 24; pp. 34530 - 34541
• Main Authors: Shapira, Niv, Deng, Zhigui, Remez, Roei, Singh, Danveer, Katzav, Eytan, Arie, Ady
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 25.11.2019
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.27.034530

Superoscillating function is a band-limited function that is locally oscillating faster than its highest Fourier component. In this work, we study and implement methods to generate multi-lobe optical superoscillating beams, with nearly constant intensity and constant local frequency. We generated superoscillating patterns having up to 12 sub-wavelength oscillations, with local frequency of 20% to 40% above the band-limit. We then test the potential application of these beams to super-resolution structured illumination microscopy. By utilizing the Moiré effect on a fluorescent grating, we have demonstrated experimentally resolution improvement over the conventional sinusoidal illumination. Our simulations show that structured illumination microscopy with super oscillating multi-lobe beams can provide more than twofold improvement in resolution, with respect to the classical diffraction limit and for coherent or incoherent modalities.