Yes - the technique is called ptychography [0] and there have been several recent electron microscopy papers too demonstrating how this technique (image reconstruction from Fourier space patterns) can reach beyond instrumental resolution limits [1, 2].

References:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptychography

[1] 2018 Nature Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0298-5 arXiv version: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630

[2] 2021 Science Paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6544/826 arXiv version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00465

Most computer folks are actually unaware that physicists were doing fourier transforms using optics long before the FFT existed. You can do physical convolutions using lenses.

...Am I having a stroke? Aren't you just talking about a prism? It converts time domain to frequency/space domain, just like the cochlea in the ear does with mechanical time-series.

No.

Fascinating! Can you explain this a bit more and share some examples?

As it happens, I did this in a physics lab just a couple of weeks ago. The basic setup is that if you pass a collimated beam of light through a mask and then focus it with a lens, the focus will contain the 2D Fourier transform of the pattern on the mask. Adding another lens does another Fourier transform getting the original image back (but flipped). By masking appropriate sections of the Fourier transform, you can physically implement various filters — e.g. a low-pass filter becomes a mask letting through only the central portion of the Fourier transform. One I remember trying is that if you take a periodic pattern like a rectangular grid, and then pass the Fourier transform through a thin slit, you can filter out only the horizontal or only the vertical component of the grid. Pretty cool stuff.

Lenses bend EM waves proportionately to their frequency, so it naturally separates the different frequencies. Bam, you've described your EM source in the frequency domain.

> Lenses bend EM waves proportionately to their frequency

Is this exact? I was under the impression that it's a linear approximation that's generally good enough for optical component glasses over the range of visual wavelengths.

(I always found it a bit frustrating that in my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate classes, they almost always introduced linear approximations without any discussion about the conditions under which the approximations held. Sometimes, they didn't even mention that the linearization was an approximation.)

It depends on the faculty. Postgraduates knows better.