Resolution enhancement via light scattering and second-order correlation

Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interference, as a second-order correlation imaging technique, can obtain Fourier spectrum of a target even if the detector is located in the Fresnel region of the target and an incoherent source is adopted. However, the imaging resolution of HBT interference is limited by the transverse size of the detector, which is similar to the transmission aperture of the receiving system in a traditional imaging system. In this paper, when a static scattering media (SSM) is inserted between the target and the detector, a high-resolution imaging method via HBT interference is proposed to break through the limitation of the detector's transverse size to imaging resolution. The resolution enhancement feasibility of the proposed method is theoretically analyzed and more than 3.6 times improvement in spatial resolution is experimentally demonstrated even if a traditional imaging system with a small transmission aperture is adopted to record the detection signal. In addition, the proposed method is always valid whenever the SSM is positioned in the Fresnel or far-field region of the target and the imaging resolution depends on the transmission aperture and surface correlation length of the SSM instead of the detector. The imaging performance comparisons with/without the SSM are also discussed.