The intensity of the reconstructed image in the transmission holographic microscope is depth discriminated as it is in a transmission confocal microscope. The effect is the consequence of the limited coherence of the illumination - hence no scanning system is needed. As the technique is based on the incoherent holography, the phase image component may be reconstructed in addition to the intensity one. The overall imaging process is coherent. Its three-dimensional coherent transfer function is derived using the first Born approximation of the scattering theory. In order to understand clearly the imaging process of the microscope, two-dimensional imaging characteristics are derived in this paper in addition to the three-dimensional one, and images of a rectilinear slit as a model two-dimensional structure are calculated for various amounts of defocus. Theoretical axial distributions of the intensity integral are compared with the experimental ones.

Date Published: 6 December 2006
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 5945, 14th Slovak-Czech-Polish Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics, 59450V (6 December 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.638945

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5945:
14th Slovak-Czech-Polish Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics
Anton Štrba; Dagmar Senderákova; Miroslav Hrabovský, Editor(s)