Quantitative Visible-Light and Electron Phase Microscopy

Abstract

At the University of Melbourne we have been pursuing an ongoing program of investigation into the recovery of phase information from intensity measurements [1-9]. In this paper we consider the implications of this work in optical and electron microscopy.Many objects of interest to biologists are phase objects which means that light is slowed and refracted in the object but not absorbed. Techniques such as phase-contrast microscopy and Nomarski differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy are traditionally used to render the phase structure visible but do not directly map the phase distribution and are unable to produce quantitative data. These techniques also entangle the phase and amplitude information and so have limitations where both phase and amplitude information is required. In this paper, we demonstrate quantitative non-interferometric recovery of microscopic phase structure using incoherent illumination of the type commonly found in optical microscopes, and show that our results correlate with structure observed using Nomarski DIC techniques.