Abstract
We report the use of a twisted nematic liquid-crystal spatial light modulator (TNLC-SLM) for quantitative phase imaging. The experimental setup is a new implementation of the SLIM principle, which is a phase shifting, white light method for quantitative phase imaging. The approach is based on switching between the phase and amplitude modulation modes of the SLM. Our system is able to deliver a 0.99 nm spatial and 1.33 nm temporal pathlength sensitivity while retaining the optical transverse resolution. The system is implemented as an additional module mounted to a conventional microscope, which makes the system very easy to deploy and integrate with other imaging modalities.
Highlights
Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI) [1] has been the subject of intense studies over the past decades [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] thanks to its ability to offer intrinsic quantitative information on the optical path length across the imaging sample
Performance of a QPI system is characterized by four different factors: (a) acquisition rate, (b) transverse resolution (c) spatial phase sensitivity and (d) temporal phase sensitivity [see Chap. 2 in Ref. 1]
The fastest acquisition rate is given by single-shot methods [22, 23] with possible transverse resolution loss
Summary
Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI) [1] has been the subject of intense studies over the past decades [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] thanks to its ability to offer intrinsic quantitative information on the optical path length across the imaging sample (see [12], Ch. 3, for a short review) This quantity is proportional to the refractive index difference times the thickness of the sample. The temporal phase sensitivity attains it maximum performance with common-path methods [6, 22]
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