Superresolution of three-dimensional optical imaging by use of evanescent waves

We simulate a three-dimensional optical diffraction tomography experiment in which superresolution. is achieved by illuminating the object with evanescent waves generated by a prism. We show that accounting for multiple scattering between the object and the prism interface is mandatory to obtain superresolved images. Because the Born approximation leads to poor results, we propose a nonlinear inversion method for retrieving the map of permittivity of the object from the scattered far field. We analyze the sensitivity to noise of our algorithm and point out the importance of using incident propagative waves together with evanescent waves to improve the robustness of the reconstruction without losing the superresolution. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.