title: Optical superresolution of focused partially spatially coherent laser beams.
abstract: We report design theories of a diffractive superresolution element (DSE) to implement optical superresolution of focused partially spatially coherent laser beams. The design problem of the DSE can be transformed into a problem of linear programming to obtain a globally optimal solution. By using the design theories, some fundamental limits of optical superresolution of focused partially spatially coherent laser beams are proposed, and several design examples are provided. As expected, both the fundamental limits and the design examples show that worse spatial coherence will cause worse superresolution performance. The design theories provide a design approach with partially coherent beams and may be useful for other design problems under partially coherent illumination.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Opto-electronic Information Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Institute of Modern Optics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China. liuht@nankai.edu.cn
authors.forename: Haitao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Guoguang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mu
authors.forename: Lie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Zhongwei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Fan