With recent years’ development of the next generation of synchrotron radiation and free electron lasers, research on x-ray measurement and imaging, such as X-ray holography and biochemical microscopy, has become a hotspot again. Tradi-tional phase-shifting digital holography is usually realized by double light paths, such as Mach-Zehnder or Tayman-Green optical systems, in which one beam is refered to as the object wave and the other beam is the reference wave. However, the main problem of low anti-interference ability remains unresolved.

    Recently, researchers at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have introduced the concept of Greek-ladder encoding into diffractive lenses and successfully constructed a series of phase-shifting bifo-cal Greek-ladder zone plates used for radial-shearing digital holography.

    In their experiment, the Greek-ladder zone plate is the core component, by means of which they realized the optical configuration of phase-shifting radial-shearing digital holography; and due to its overall low phase changes and the asymmetric structure, a phase-only “peaks” function was reconstructed through the common-path phase-shifting interference method.

    The proposed phase-shifting radial-shearing holography has many advantages, such as simple operation, strong anti-interference capability and high sensitivity. The experimental and simulation results agree well with the theoretical analysis and verify the validity of the phase-shifting radial-shifting digital holography.

    Obviously, this method has great potential in observation of transparent biologi-cal cell, nondestructive testing of surfaces and high-resolution biological imaging in physical and life sciences.

    This research, entitled "Phase-shifting radial-shearing digital holography with Greek-ladder zone plates" has been published in Optics Letters.

    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Optical configuration of phase-shifting radial-shearing holography

Article website:
https://www.osapublishing.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-43-22-5575

Contact:

Mr. Cao Yong
General Administrative Office
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, CAS
Email: caoyong@siom.ac.cn