A Mathematical Theory of Near-Field Super-Resolution

Source abstract

Finite-aperture near-field sensing leads to a super-resolution geometry fundamentally different from the translation-invariant Fourier setting. In the Fresnel regime, wavefront curvature introduces a range-dependent quadratic aperture phase, so distinguishability is governed by incomplete quadratic exponential sums of the form $\sum_{n=0}^{N_r-1} a_n e^{i(ω_1 n+ω_2 n^2)}$, rather than by angular separation alone. We develop a deterministic recovery theory for sparse measures with ranges on a finite grid and continuous angles, and introduce a support-uniform quadratic-phase aperture criterion replacing classical minimum separation. Under this criterion, total-variation minimization exactly recovers every sparse measure in the admissible support class, uniformly over all nonzero complex amplitudes. The proof develops nonasymptotic support-uniform bounds for finite quadratic sums and combines them with a gauged Hermite dual certificate controlling interpolation, local curvature, and off-support leakage. We further construct a finite-harmonic Bessel-Vandermonde lift with explicit truncation error. In the far-field limit, the quadratic phase disappears and the theory reduces to Fourier-type angular super-resolution.