The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light. There is ways to get around it in the near field (up to

The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light. There is ways to get around it in the near field (up to a few ten wavelength away from the source). But in the far field you can not get a perfectly divergence-free finite-width beam. [1] Nor can you focus a beam to a beam waist smaller than about the wavelength. In practice the situation is even worse and you can't even get the performance that a perfect Gaussian beam would allow. We often express the performance of real beams by a thing called M^2 or beam quality parameter [2]. In some sense is measures how much wider the beam is than it needs to be, and this number is never less than one. [1] Btw such a beam would have infinite brilliance. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_squared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_squared