Mirror-assisted tomographic diffractive microscopy with isotropic resolution.

ABSTRACT

We demonstrate that the axial resolution of a reflection tomographic diffractive microscope is drastically improved when the sample is placed in front of a perfect mirror. We show analytically and with rigorous simulations that this approach permits us to obtain images with the same isotropic resolution as that obtained when the sample is illuminated and observed from every possible angle. The main difficulty lies in accounting properly for the mirror in the inversion algorithm.