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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Shaping the Amplitude and Phase of Laser Beams by Using a Phase-only Spatial Light Modulator
Published on: January 28, 2019
Phase from chromatic aberrations
Laura Waller1, Shan Shan Kou, Colin J R Sheppard
1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. lwaller@alum.mit.edu
Abstract:
We show that phase objects may be computed accurately from a single color image in a brightfield microscope, with no hardware modification. Our technique uses the chromatic aberration that is inherent to every lens-based imaging system as a phase contrast mechanism. This leads to a simple and inexpensive way of achieving single-shot quantitative phase recovery by a modified Transport of Intensity Equation (TIE) solution, allowing real-time phase imaging in a traditional microscope.
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