Deterministic phase retrieval employing spherical illumination

Abstract

Deterministic Phase Retrieval techniques (DPRTs) employ a series of paraxial beam intensities in order to recover the phase of a complex field. These paraxial intensities are usually generated in systems that employ plane-wave illumination. This type of illumination allows a direct processing of the captured intensities with DPRTs for recovering the phase. Furthermore, it has been shown that intensities for DPRTs can be acquired from systems that use spherical illumination as well. However, this type of illumination presents a major setback for DPRTs: the captured intensities change their size for each position of the detector on the propagation axis. In order to apply the DPRTs, reescalation of the captured intensities has to be applied. This condition can increase the error sensitivity of the final phase result if it is not carried out properly. In this work, we introduce a novel system based on a Phase Light Modulator (PLM) for capturing the intensities when employing spherical illumination. The proposed optical system enables us to capture the diffraction pattern of under, in, and over-focus intensities. The employment of the PLM allows capturing the corresponding intensities without displacing the detector. Moreover, with the proposed optical system we can control accurately the magnification of the captured intensities. Thus, the stack of captured intensities can be used in DPRTs, overcoming the problems related with the resizing of the images. In order to prove our claims, the corresponding numerical experiments will be carried out. These simulations will show that the retrieved phases with spherical illumination are accurate and can be compared with those that employ plane wave illumination. We demonstrate that with the employment of the PLM, the proposed optical system has several advantages as: the optical system is compact, the beam size on the detector plane is controlled accurately, and the errors coming from mechanical motion can be suppressed easily.