Improvement of telescope resolution using a diffractive phase modulater

Abstract

Metasurface, fluorescent microscopy and scanning near-field optical microscopy can improve the resolution of microscopes remarkably, while the resolution of the telescope remains unimproved constrained by its giant objective lenses and distant targets. Here we put forward a way to raise the resolution of telescopes simply by adding a binary optical thin surface around its focal plane. Simulation results show that the surface can raise the image quality in the Cassegrain and Kepler telescope. By nano-lathe, we fabricated a designed binary surface and experiment it in the Kepler telescope. The results are consistent with those of simulation results. More details of the calibrated target are resolvable on the image plane after applying the binary optical surface. It proves that the binary optic surface can make contribute to the resolution of the telescope, thus is beneficial in astronomy, military surveillance field.