Sounds a bit snake-oily t'me... Seems nothing could be easier than the current way of masking-out the center of the image. If they'd provide a ray-trace diagram to show how a 'ramp' could effect the same function as a mask then that'd be one thing; the three sets of colored dots with the article by themselves prove nothing.
Dr. Who had one of those. Or was it a flux capacitor?
/john
The original article appears in Optics Letters and requires a fee for article downloads, but judging from the various titles there, it ain't a bunch of pseudo scientific charlatans. From the brief explanation given in the linked reference, it sounds like it might exploit very subtle differences in circular polarization of the incoming starlight to resolve it beyond limits imposed by the conventional diffraction limited Rayleigh criterion, and if it works, will be a great addition to observational astronomy.
Cool.
