The properties of the plasma waveguide of finite thickness (plasma tube) have been studied. The analysis indicates that, in the case of finite thickness, most of the properties for the plasma waveguide with infinite thickness are retained. At high frequencies, such a plasma tube is still a nondispersive waveguide system. The losses due to the finite thickness of the cladding and the conductivity of the plasma are both small. The decay coefficient decreases with the thickness exponentially. With a thickness equal to the radius of the central core, the attenuation can be as low as 0.1 dB/km.

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Classical information theory can be used to quantify the resolution performance of optical imaging systems. When an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) operated as a phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) in the transverse spatial domain is used for point source imaging, the angular resolution improvement can approach the de Broglie resolution (i.e. Heisenberg limit). In this paper, classical information theory is employed to quantify the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement for both an ideal and a realistic multimode PSA applied to the problem of sub-Rayleigh imaging. When only considering the noise originating from the detector, the SNR improvement is found to scale quadratically as a function of the PSA gain, in the limit of noise power comparable to signal power. Differences in performance of an ideal PSA and a realistic PSA are discussed.