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.