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Spiral phase contrast imaging in microscopy

Severin Fürhapter, Alexander Jesacher, Stefan Bernet, and Monika Ritsch-Marte

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

We demonstrate an optical method for edge contrast enhancement in light microscopy. The method is based on holographic Fourier plane filtering of the microscopic image with a spiral phase element (also called vortex phase or helical phase filter) displayed as an off-axis hologram at a computer controlled high resolution spatial light modulator (SLM) in the optical imaging pathway. The phase hologram imprints a helical phase term of the form exp(iφ) on the diffracted light field in its Fourier plane. In the image plane, this results in a strong and isotropic edge contrast enhancement for both amplitude and phase objects.

©2005 Optical Society of America

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Supplementary Material (1)

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Figures (4)
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Simulation of the imaging of a circular phase step for the phase contrast and for the spiral phase contrast method. Image A shows the result for phase contrast imaging of a phase step of 0.25% of the optical wavelength. The image contrast is 6%. In B the same simulation is performed for spiral phase imaging. There the image contrast is 100%. The graph at the right shows the resulting image contrast of the phase contrast method (oscillating) and the spiral phase contrast method (equals 1 at any point).

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Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Sketch of our experimental setup. The displayed holograms A-D used for certain spatial filtering purposes in the Fourier plane are not to scale. Details of the experiment are explained in the text.

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Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. From the left: Bright-field, spiral phase contrast and dark-field image of an absorptive sample (resolution target, size of the total image area is 400×300 microns), imaged in transmission geometry. The three images were taken under identical illumination and camera settings.

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Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. (1.04 MBytes) Contrast enhancement of phase objects. Two pairs (A–B, and C–D) of bright-field images (A, C) and spiral phase filtered images (B, D) of the same sample areas of a phase object. In A–B the sample consisted of a scratch in a glass coverslip, coated with water. The attached movie shows an extended scan over a larger sample area, comparing the two imaging modes. In (C) and (D) another sample is imaged, consisting of a sharp oil-water boundary.

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