Super-resolution microscopy via fluctuation-enhanced spatial mode demultiplexing

We introduce a super-resolution technique that combines spatial mode demultiplexing (SPADE) with emitter blinking. We show that temporal fluctuations not only enhance the precision of SPADE imaging, but also drastically simplify the measurement required to recover full object information—in the presence of fluctuations, SPADE can be replaced by the much simpler image inversion interferometry. Both gains come from exploiting temporal cumulants of the detected signal. We further show that the proposed fluctuation-enhanced techniques are significantly more robust to dark-count noise than conventional SPADE.