title: Beating Rayleigh's Curse by Imaging Using Phase Information.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control and Institute for Optical Sciences, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George St, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A7.
authors.forename: Weng-Kian
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Tham
authors.affiliation: Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control and Institute for Optical Sciences, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George St, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A7.
authors.forename: Hugo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ferretti
authors.affiliation: Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control and Institute for Optical Sciences, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George St, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A7.|Canadian Institute For Advanced Research, 180 Dundas St. W., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5G 1Z8.
authors.forename: Aephraim M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Steinberg