3D refractive index reconstruction from phaseless coherent optical microscopy data using multiple scattering-based inverse solvers—a study

Abstract

Abstract Reconstructing 3D refractive index profile of scatterers using optical microscopy measurements presents several challenges over the conventional microwave and RF domain measurement scenario. These include phaseless and polarization-insensitive measurements, small numerical aperture, as well as a Green’s function where spatial frequencies are integrated in a weighted manner such that far-field angular spectrum cannot be probed and high spatial frequencies that permit better resolution are weighed down. As a result of these factors, the non-linearity and the ill-posedness of the inverse problem are quite severe. These limitations have imposed that inverse scattering problems in the microscopy domain largely consider scalar wave approximations and neglect multiple scattering. Here, we present first inverse scattering results for optical microscopy setup where full-wave vectorial formulation and multiple scattering is incorporated. We present (a) how three popular inverse scattering solvers from microwave domain can be adapted for the present inverse problem, (b) the opportunities and challenges presented by each of these solvers, (c) a comparative insight into these solvers and contrast with the simpler Born approximation approach, and (d) potential routes to improve the performance of these solvers for the hard inverse problem of optical microscopy.