On the impact of realistic point sources in spatial mode demultiplexing super resolution imaging

The desire to push beyond 'Rayleigh's curse' has resulted in new techniques for super resolution imaging by deconstructing scattered light from point sources into several spatial modes, as coupling to higher order modes is exquisitely sensitive to lateral displacement. Here we implement such an approach for high numerical aperture objectives and demonstrate that for gold nanoparticles, their intrinsic asymmetry results in coupling to higher order modes without lateral displacement. This situation not only applies to practical nanoparticles but is applicable to any dipole emitter due to the asymmetry of the emission. However, with full polarization analysis we suggest that one may be able to apply such spatial mode demultiplexing techniques.