Fast structured illumination microscopy with a large dynamic measurement range.

Abstract

Fast structured illumination microscopy plays an important role in micro-nano detection due to the features of high accuracy, high efficiency, and excellent adaptability. The existing method utilizes the linear region of the axial modulation response curve (AMR), and by building the relationship between the modulation and the real height, achieves topography recovery. However, the traditional method is limited to narrow dynamic measurement range due to the linear region of the AMR being very short. In this paper, a double-differential fast structured illumination microscopy (DDFSIM) is proposed. By introducing two additional detectable branches for building the double-differential axial modulation response curve (DDAMR), the proposed method can obtain a large dynamic measurement range. In the measurement, three charge-coupled devices are respectively placed in and behind and before the focal plane to generate three axial modulation response curves. Three AMRs are used to set up the DDAMR, which has a large dynamic measurement range. Through simulation and experimental verification, the measurement range of DDFSIM is twice that of the conventional method under the same system parameters.