Light microscope with novel digital method to achieve super-resolution

A method for reconstructing a wave, comprising the steps of:

• illuminating a specimen at an output plane to provide an output wave comprising specimen information, the output plane including a null region in which the output wave has a value of zero;
• applying a number N of different phase filters of known phase shift to the output wave at or near the output plane to create N phase-shifted waves each having a phase shift that corresponds to a respective phase filter;
• measuring at a diffraction plane only a portion of the amplitude distribution for each of N diffraction patterns to provide measured and unmeasured portions of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns, each diffraction pattern corresponding to a respective one of the phase-shifted waves;
• inverse Fourier-transforming each of the measured portions of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns to produce a respective computed estimate of the phase-shifted wave at the output plane, the computed estimates comprising both amplitude and phase information;
• applying a respective inverse phase filter to each of the computed estimates of the phase-shifted waves to remove the phase-shift introduced by the corresponding phase filter to provide computed estimates of non-phase-shifted waves at the output plane;
• correcting the computed estimates of the non-phase-shifted waves by setting the values of the amplitude and phase to zero for those portions of the computed estimates of the non-phase-shifted waves which correspond to the null region of the output plane to provide a plurality of corrected estimates;
• and
• recovering the amplitude and phase in the diffraction plane of the unmeasured portion of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns based on the corrected estimates,
• whereby the amplitude and phase information of the unmeasured portion is recovered to achieve super-resolution.