Off-axis digital holographic microscopy with LED illumination based on polarization filtering

A reflection mode digital holographic microscope with light emitting diode (LED) illumination and off-axis interferometry is proposed The setup is comprised of a Linnik interferometer and a grating based 41 imaging unit. Both object and reference waves travel coaxially and are split into multiple diffraction orders in the Fourier plane by the grating. The zeroth and first orders are filtered by a polarizing array to select orthogonally polarized object waves and reference waves. Subsequently, the object and reference waves are combined again in the output plane of the 4f system, and then the hologram with uniform contrast over the entire field of view can be acquired with the aid of a polarizer. The one-shot nature in the off-axis configuration enables an interferometric recording time on a millisecond scale. The validity of the proposed setup is illustrated by imaging nanostructured substrates, and the experimental results demonstrate that the phase noise is reduced drastically by an order of 68% when compared to a He Ne laser-based result. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America