title: Ptychographic microscope for three-dimensional imaging.
abstract: Ptychography is a coherent imaging technique that enables an image of a specimen to be generated from a set of diffraction patterns. One limitation of the technique is the assumption of a multiplicative interaction between the illuminating coherent beam and the specimen, which restricts ptychography to samples no thicker than a few tens of micrometers in the case of visible-light imaging at micron-scale resolution. By splitting a sample into axial sections, we demonstrated in recent work that this thickness restriction can be relaxed and whats-more, that coarse optical sectioning can be realized using a single ptychographic data set. Here we apply our technique to data collected from a modified optical microscope to realize a reduction in the optical sectioning depth to 2 μm in the axial direction for samples up to 150 μm thick. Furthermore, we increase the number of sections that are imaged from 5 in our previous work to 34 here. Our results compare well with sectioned images collected from a confocal microscope but have the added advantage of strong phase contrast, which removes the need for sample staining.
authors.forename: T M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Godden
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Suman
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Humphry
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Rodenburg
authors.forename: A M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Maiden