Microsphere-assisted common-path grating-based digital holographic microscopy

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Microscopy Techniques
• Biomedical Imaging

Background:

• Common-path digital holographic microscopy (DHM) offers high temporal stability for 3D quantitative phase imaging.
• Self-referencing DHM simplifies setups but suffers from reduced field of view (FoV) and limited spatial resolution.
• Existing solutions for DHM limitations often increase complexity and cost.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a simplified, full-field, self-referencing DHM configuration.
• To overcome the reduced FoV and spatial resolution limitations of conventional self-referencing DHM.
• To demonstrate integration with microsphere-assisted microscopy (MAM) for enhanced resolution.

Main Methods:

• A novel self-referencing DHM setup utilizing a diffraction grating and a pinhole at the Fourier plane.
• Spatially filtering the zero-order diffraction to create a clean, sample-free reference beam.
• Integration with microsphere-assisted microscopy (MAM) for super-resolution imaging.

Main Results:

• The system successfully utilizes the entire FoV by filtering residual object information from the reference beam.
• Achieved enhanced spatial resolution by integrating with MAM, surpassing the diffraction limit.
• Validated on a standard diffraction grating, demonstrating sub-diffraction-limit feature resolution.

Conclusions:

• The simplified self-referencing DHM configuration effectively expands the FoV and improves spatial resolution.
• Integration with MAM provides a cost-effective method for achieving super-resolution in DHM.
• This approach offers a promising tool for high-contrast, high-resolution 3D quantitative phase imaging.