Superresolution in total internal reflection tomography

We simulate a total internal reflection tomography experiment in which an unknown object is illuminated by evanescent waves and the scattered field is detected along several directions. We propose a full-vectorial three-dimensional nonlinear inversion scheme to retrieve the map of the permittivity of the object from the scattered far-field data. We study the role of the solid angle of illumination, the incident polarization, and the position of the prism interface on the resolution of the images. We compare our algorithm with a linear inversion scheme based on the renormalized Born approximation and stress the importance of multiple scattering in this particular configuration. We analyze the sensitivity to noise and point out that using incident propagative waves together with evanescent waves improves the robustness of the reconstruction. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.