Improved longitudinal resolution in tomographic diffractive microscopy with an ellipsoidal mirror

Tomographic diffractive microscopy is a technique, which is able to image transparent unstained samples with high resolution. The three-dimensional distribution of the complex refractive index can be reconstructed quantitatively from the measured scattered fields under various illumination and detection angles, according to the diffraction tomography theorem. We propose a tomographic diffractive microscopy setup with an ellipsoidal mirror as the light collector. We demonstrate analytically and with numerical simulation that this approach permits to obtain images with drastically improved resolution.