Lateral shearing common-path digital holographic microscopy based on a slightly trapezoid Sagnac interferometer

Abstract

We propose a compact and easy-to-align lateral shearing common-path digital holographic microscopy, which is based on a slightly trapezoid Sagnac interferometer to create two laterally sheared beams and form off-axis geometry. In this interferometer, the two beams pass through a set of identical optical elements in opposite directions and have nearly the same optical path difference. Without any vibration isolation, the temporal stability of the setup is found to be around 0.011 rad. Compared with highly simple lateral shearing interferometer, the off-axis angle of the setup can be easily adjusted and quantitatively controlled, meanwhile the image quality is not degraded. The experiments for measuring the static and dynamic specimens are performed to demonstrate the capability and applicability.

Quantitative and Dynamic Phase Imaging of Biological Cells by the Use of the Digital Holographic Microscopy Based on a Beam Displacer Unit

“…This is very important for the tiny specimen measurement, such as living biological cells that are of the order of several nanometers. Compared with other common-path configurations, the proposed common-path DHM exhibits better temporal stability and performance [18], [28]. In the meanwhile, a high stability light source will help further improve the stability of the system.…”

Single-Element Reflective Digital Holographic Microscopy

“…For instance, such a beam can be created: (1) by the reflection of the light in a reference mirror inside a Mirau interferometric objective [18]; (2) by a spatial filtering at the Fourier plane in diffraction phase microscopy [17,19]; by using the clear regions near to sparse samples in lateral shearing interferometry [24][25][26][27], (3) by spatially-multiplexing the field of view (FOV) [23], or (4) by using a modulator mask in single pixel phase imaging [21,22].…”

Highly temporal stable, wavelength-independent, and scalable field-of-view common-path quantitative phase microscope

“…14 During the last decade, various common-path QPM techniques have been developed to minimize the temporal phase noise. 1,3,[14][15][16][17][18] Diffraction phase microscopy 3,14,19 or spatial light interference microscopy 15 employs diffraction grating and SLM, which makes the system costly. The diffraction grating diffracts the input beam into several orders, which reduces the diffracted beam intensity into zero and þ1 order by several orders of magnitude.…”