High spatial and temporal resolution synthetic aperture phase microscopy.
A new optical microscopy technique, termed high spatial and temporal resolution synthetic aperture phase microscopy (HISTR-SAPM), is proposed to improve the lateral resolution of wide-field coherent imaging. Under plane wave illumination, the resolution is increased by twofold to around 260 nm, while achieving millisecond-level temporal resolution. In HISTR-SAPM, digital micromirror devices are used to actively change the sample illumination beam angle at high speed with high stability. An off-axis interferometer is used to measure the sample scattered complex fields, which are then processed to reconstruct high-resolution phase images. Using HISTR-SAPM, we are able to map the height profiles of subwavelength photonic structures and resolve the period structures that have 198 nm linewidth and 132 nm gap (i.e., a full pitch of 330 nm). As the reconstruction averages out laser speckle noise while maintaining high temporal resolution, HISTR-SAPM further enables imaging and quantification of nanoscale dynamics of live cells, such as red blood cell membrane fluctuations and subcellular structure dynamics within nucleated cells. We envision that HISTR-SAPM will broadly benefit research in material science and biology.
['Zheng|Cheng|C|', 'Jin|Di|D|', 'He|Yanping|Y|', 'Lin|Hongtao|H|', 'Hu|Juejun|J|', 'Yaqoob|Zahid|Z|', 'So|Peter T C|PTC|', 'Zhou|Renjie|R|0000-0002-4761-6641']
cell dynamics observation label-free imaging material inspection quantitative phase microscopy