Common-path configuration in total internal reflection digital holography microscopy

Abstract

Total Internal Reflection Digital Holographic Microscopy (TIRDHM) is recognized to be a powerful tool for retrieving quantitative phase images of cell-substrate interfaces, adhesions, and tissue structures close to the prism surface. In this Letter, we develop an improved TIRDHM system, taking advantage of a refractive index mismatch between the prism and the sample substrate, to allow phase-shifting DH with just a single-beam interferometric configuration. Instead of the traditional off-axis method, phase-shift method is used to retrieve amplitude and phase images in coherent light and TIR modality. Essentially, the substrate-prism interface acts like a beam splitter generating a reference beam, where the phase-shift dependence on the incident angle is exploited in this common-path configuration. With the aim to demonstrate the technique's validity, some experiments are performed to establish the advantage of this compact and simple configuration, in which the reference arm in the setup is avoided.

Quantitative phase imaging based on Fresnel diffraction from a phase plate

“…In the dynamic measurements, different environmental effects between the beams, namely, the individual mechanical vibration of optical components, inevitably trigger some remnant time-dependent noises which reduce the quality of * m-dashtdar@sbu.ac.ir retrieved images. Recently, many efforts have been devoted toward developing new settings with the higher phase sensitivity such as self-reference or common-path interferometers (CPIs), through which the phase stability of the system is significantly enhanced as the two overlapping beams travel along nearly equivalent paths [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Despite having the several advantages including simplicity and phase stability, many of the CPIs suffer from functional challenges which are imposed by loss of flux, inflexible off-axis angle, small field of view (FOV) limitation and precise optical alignment.…”

Wide field of view common-path lateral-shearing digital holographic interference microscope

“…To overcome the problem of temporal stability, common-path interferometric technique can be used. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] Common-path techniques duplicate the object wavefront and generate the reference wavefront from one of these duplicated wavefronts. This can be done by either spatially filtering one of the duplicated wavefronts and using it as the reference wavefront [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] or using a portion of the duplicated wavefront (which does not contain object information) as the reference wavefront.…”

Investigating fibroblast cells under “safe” and “injurious” blue‐light exposure by holographic microscopy

“…Basically, DH measures directly the phase changes undergone by a light wave passing through or reflecting from objects [35][36][37][38]. Such measured phases can be converted to a volume's change of the cell through a variety of phase unwrapping methods.…”

“…In recent years, the digital holography (DH) in microscopy configuration has been proved to be suitable for bio physics experiments to evaluate quantitatively forces, positions and biovolumes [28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Basically, DH measures directly the phase changes undergone by a light wave passing through or reflecting from objects [35][36][37][38]. Such measured phases can be converted to a volume's change of the cell through a variety of phase unwrapping methods.…”