We use compressive in-line holography to image air bubbles in water and investigate the effect of bubble concentration on reconstruction performance by simulation. Our forward model treats bubbles as finite spheres and uses Mie scattering to compute the scattered field in a physically rigorous manner. Although no simple analytical bounds on maximum concentration can be derived within the classical compressed sensing framework due to the complexity of the forward model, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves in our simulation provide an empirical concentration bound for accurate bubble detection by compressive holography at different noise levels, resulting in a maximum tolerable concentration much higher than the traditional back-propagation method.

Optical microscopy has become an indispensable tool for visualizing sub-cellular structures and biological processes. However, scattering in biological tissues is a major obstacle that prevents high-resolution images from being obtained from deep regions of tissue. We review common techniques, such as multiphoton microscopy (MPM) and optical coherence microscopy (OCM), for di®raction limited imaging beyond an imaging depth of 0.5 mm. Novel implementations have been emerging in recent years giving higher imaging speed, deeper penetration, and better image quality. Focal modulation microscopy (FMM) is a novel method that combines confocal spatial ltering with focal modulation to reject out-of-focus background. FMM has demonstrated an imaging depth comparable to those of MPM and OCM, near-real-time image acquisition, and the capability for multiple contrast mechanisms.

Fluorescence, absorption and vibrational spectroscopic techniques were used to study spinach at the photosystem II (PS II), chloroplast and cellular levels and to determine the effects and mechanisms of ultraviolet-B (UV-B) photoinhibition of these structures. Two-photon fluorescence spectroscopic imaging of intact chloroplasts shows significant spatial variations in the component fluorescence spectra in the range 640-740 nm, indicating that the type and distribution of chlorophylls vary markedly with position in the chloroplast. The chlorophyll distributions and excitonic behaviour in chloroplasts and whole plant tissue were studied using picosecond time-gated fluorescence imaging, which also showed UV-induced kinetic changes that clearly indicate that UV-B induces both structural and excitonic uncoupling of chlorophylls within the light-harvesting complexes. Transient absorption measurements and low-frequency infrared and Raman spectroscopy show that the predominant sites of UV-B damage in PS II are at the oxygen-evolving centre (OEC) itself, as well as at specific locations near the OEC-binding sites.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a widely used structural imaging method. However, it has limited use in molecular imaging due to the lack of an effective contrast mechanism. Gold nanoparticles have been widely used as molecular probes for optical microcopy based on Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR). Unfortunately, the SPR enhanced backscattering from nanoparticles is still relatively weak compared with the background signal from microscopic structures in biological tissues when imaged with OCT. Consequently, it is extremely challenging to perform OCT imaging of conventional nanoparticles in thick tissues with sensitivity comparable to that of fluorescence imaging. We have discovered and demonstrated a novel approach towards remarkable contrast enhancement, which is achieved by the use of a circular-polarization optical coherence microscopy system and 3-dimensional chiral nanostructures as contrast agents. By detecting the circular intensity differential depolarization (CIDD), we successfully acquired high quality images of single chiral nanoparticles underneath a 1-mm-thick tissue -mimicking phantom.

The idea of superresolving pupil filters comes from the concept of superoscillations that may occur in regions of a band-limited signal with small amplitude having oscillations faster than the fastest Fourier component of the signal. In optical microscopy, superresolution can be achieved by appropriate design of pupil functions where the angular aperture determines the ultimate focal spot smaller than the Abbe diffraction limit outside the evanescent field region. The angular aperture cannot be increased indefinitely and the huge sidelobes cannot be avoided that are present in superresolving filters. The limitations of using such kind of filters in microscopy applications are discussed through computational examples.

Diffraction gratings are among the most commonly used optical elements in applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology to lasers. Numerous methods have been adopted for the fabrication of gratings, including microelectromechanical system (MEMS) fabrication which is by now mature and presents opportunities for tunable gratings through inclusion of an actuation mechanism. We have designed, modeled, fabricated and tested a silicon based pitch tunable diffraction grating (PTG) with relatively large resolving power that could be deployed in a spaceborne imaging spectrometer, for example in a picosatellite. We have carried out a detailed analytical modeling of PTG, based on a mass spring system. The device has an effective fill factor of 52% and resolving power of 84. Tuning provided by electrostatic actuation results in a displacement of 2.7 sans-serifμnormalm at 40 V. Further, we have carried out vibration testing of the fabricated structure to evaluate its feasibility for spaceborne instruments.

We formulate coherence retrieval, the process of recovering via intensity measurements the two-point correlation function of a partially coherent field, as a convex weighted least-squares problem and show that it can be solved with a novel iterated descent algorithm using a coherent-modes factorization of the mutual intensity. This algorithm is more memory-efficient than the standard interior point methods used to solve convex problems, and we verify its feasibility by reconstructing the mutual intensity of a Schell-model source from both simulated data and experimental measurements.

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