Subdiffraction-scale surface roughness impact upon spectroscopic microscopy detection of internal refractive index fluctuations: Applications to early-state cancer detection

Despite the fundamental diffraction limit of optical microscopy, we previously established that three-dimensional (3-D) subdiffraction-scale refractive-index (RI) fluctuations internal to a linear, label-free dielectric medium can be detected in the far zone with spectroscopic microscopy (Cherkezyan et al., PRL 111, 033903 (2013)). However, in our prior work, the air-medium interface was assumed to be a smooth plane.