Temporal super resolution imaging inspired by structured illumination microscopy

Abstract

In this paper, a method for increasing the temporal resolution of a temporal imaging system has been developed. Analogously to the conventional spatial imaging systems in which resolution limit is due to the finite aperture of the lens, in a temporal imaging system, finite temporal aperture of the time lens is responsible for limited temporal resolution. Based on the method used in spatial structured illumination super-resolution microscopy in spatial optics, we have utilized time prisms, which are temporal versions of conventional prisms, to shift the illusive frequency components of the input signal to become captured by the time lens. This method would pave the way to a highresolution temporal imaging system which has applications in the observation and study of fast and rare phenomena such as dynamics and evolution of optical rogue waves or cancer cells in the blood.

The temporal analogue of diffractive couplers

“…Therefore, our proposed concept presents an interesting alternate to a set of classical beam splitting cubes and multiple delay-lines that could be very tricky to adjust in terms of delay and amplitude. It can be one of the building block of photonic setups targeting temporal super resolution [42] or temporal holography. One may also easily extend our concept to generate pulse sequence with different amplitudes that could be further used, through cross-phase modulation, to generate multi-focal imaging.…”

Fibers-based temporal super-resolved imaging

“…Based on a similar concept, the temporal resolution was defined in previous works to be the shortest transform-limited Gaussian FWHM pulse-width that we get in the output of the lens after inserting a Gaussian pulse in it 25 . Because of this resolution limitation, temporal super-resolution methods have been proposed such as a method that is based on localization microscopy algorithm 26 , time lens array imaging 27 , and a method that is inspired by structured illumination microscopy 28 .…”

Temporal Fresnel diffraction induced by phase jumps in linear and nonlinear optical fibres

“…Indeed, the parabolic spectral phase induced by the dispersion of an ultrashort optical pulse is equivalent to the paraxial diffraction affecting the spatial propagation of a light beam [5][6][7]. This space/time duality has already been extremely fruitful and has stimulated numerous new concepts or interpretation in ultrafast optics such as temporal or spectral lenses [8,9], Fresnel lens [10], super resolution imaging [11], dispersion gratings [12] or two-wave temporal interferometers [13], to cite a few. Other studies have established links between the near-field propagation observed in diffraction and advanced applications for high repetition-rate sources when initial periodic phase modulation is converted into intensity pattern [14][15][16][17][18] in a process that can be linked to the Talbot array illuminators in the spatial domain [19].…”