Study of Superoscillating Functions Application to Overcome the Diffraction Limit with Suppressed Sidelobes

The problem of overcoming the diffraction limit does not have an unambiguously advantageous solution because of the competing nature of different beams’ parameters, such as the focal spot size, energy efficiency, and sidelobe level. The possibility to overcome the diffraction limit with suppressed sidelobes out of the near-field zone using superoscillating functions was investigated in detail. Superoscillation is a phenomenon in which a superposition of harmonic functions contains higher spatial frequencies than any of the terms in the superposition. Two types of superoscillating one-dimensional signals were considered, and simulation of their propagation in the near diffraction zone based on plane waves expansion was performed. A comparative numerical study showed the possibility of overcoming the diffraction limit with a reduced level of sidelobes at a certain distance outside the zone of evanescent waves.

Holomorphic functions, relativistic sum, Blaschke products and superoscillations

Superoscillating functions are band-limited functions that can oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. The notion of superoscillation is a particular case of that one of supershift. In the recent years, superoscillating functions, that appear for example in weak values in quantum mechanics, have become an interesting and independent field of research in complex analysis and in the theory of infinite order differential operators. The aim of this paper is to study some infinite order differential operators acting on entire functions which naturally arise in the study of superoscillating functions. Such operators are of particular interest because they are associated with the relativistic sum of the velocities and with the Blaschke products. To show that some sequences of functions preserve the superoscillatory behavior it is of crucial importance to prove that their associated infinite order differential operators act continuously on some spaces of entire functions with growth conditions.

A new method to generate superoscillating functions and supershifts

Superoscillations are band-limited functions that can oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. These functions (or sequences) appear in weak values in quantum mechanics and in many fields of science and technology such as optics, signal processing and antenna theory. In this paper, we introduce a new method to generate superoscillatory functions that allows us to construct explicitly a very large class of superoscillatory functions.

Evolution of Superoscillations in the Dirac Field

Superoscillating functions are band-limited functions that can oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. The study of the evolution of superoscillations as initial datum of field equations requires the notion of supershift, which generalizes the concept of superoscillations. The present paper has a dual purpose. The first one is to give an updated and self-contained explanation of the strategy to study the evolution of superoscillations by referring to the quantum-mechanical Schrödinger equation and its variations. The second purpose is to treat the Dirac equation in relativistic quantum theory. The treatment of the evolution of superoscillations for the Dirac equation can be deduced by recent results on the Klein–Gordon equation, but further additional considerations are in order, which are fully described in this paper.