Abstract
We propose optical spectral encoding of an object's spatial frequencies as a means of transmitting, through a low-numerical-aperture optical system, spatial information with an instantaneous spatial frequency bandwidth wider than the optical system's diffraction-limited bandwidth. We validate this new superresolution approach experimentally and demonstrate one of its possible practical implementations - wide-field spectrally encoded imaging that is sensitive to nanometre-scale local variations in the microstructure of centimetre-scale samples.