THREE DIMENSIONAL IMAGING WITH HOLOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS

Abstract

High resolution, depth resolved three dimensional (3D) microscopes are extremely useful tools for biomedical and life science researches. Multiplexed volume holograms have been used in imaging systems as a special pupil filter for single-shot multi-plane 3D images. We analyzed the performance of the volume holographic imaging system (VHIS) theoretically and investigated the performance (lateral resolution and depth selectivity) in relation to the bandwidth of the illumination source. We showed that broadband source degrades the imaging performance. We demonstrated a wide range of applications of VHIS including 3D particle manipulation and visualization, remote weak signal detection in telescope systems, etc. We also proposed to use a multiple light-sheets illumination scheme to improve the depth selectivity in VHIS. This new scheme has enabled multi-plane imaging fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. The parallelism of VHIS removes the scanning mechanism which is required in conventional microscopes. Possible future research directions of VHIS are also discussed.