Tomographic Diffractive Microscopy: A Review of Methods and Recent Developments

Abstract

Tomographic diffractive microscopy (TDM) is a label-free, far-field, super-resolution microscope. The significant difference between TDM and wide-field microscopy is that in TDM the sample is illuminated from various directions with a coherent collimated beam and the complex diffracted field is collected from many scattered angles. By utilizing inversion procedures, the permittivity/refractive index of investigated samples can be retrieved from the measured diffracted field to reconstruct the geometrical parameters of a sample. TDM opens up new opportunities to study biological samples and nano-structures and devices, which require resolution beyond the Rayleigh limit. In this review, we describe the principles and recent advancements of TDM and also give the perspectives of this fantastic microscopy technique.

Roadmap on Label‐Free Super‐Resolution Imaging

“…Tomographic microscopy is gaining attention in biology, thanks to its capacity of imaging unlabelled samples at high resolution, with some specificity provided by quantification of the sample index of refraction (see recent reviews [247,[422][423][424][425] and references therein). Future developments could increase its domains of application towards material sciences, or metrology of micronanofabrication.…”

“…To study dynamic samples, or for high-throughput screening, possible in holographic, fluorescence and conventional staining microscopy, a real-time acquisition, reconstruction, and 3D display of the observed sample image would be very helpful (see Refs. [421,422,423,424,425,247] and references therein). This will require important development to fasten acquisitions and numerical image computation.…”

Editorial on Special Issue “Holography, 3-D Imaging and 3-D Display”

“…Experimental results demonstrate more accurate and faster performance than other existing filters [17]. Zhang et al provide a review on tomographic diffractive microscopy (TDM) and suggest that TDM will play a key role in the exploration of biological cells as well as for the investigation of nano-structure devices [18]. Finally, Wang et al characterize the phase response of spatial light modulators for coherent imaging [19].…”