Three-dimensional microscopy with single-beam wavefront sensing and reconstruction from speckle fields

Generally, 3D digital holographic microscopy requires the interference of the object wave with a known reference beam under coherent illumination to perform numerical focusing. This configuration may be challenging for some applications, including the use of exotic wavelengths such as x rays, miniaturized instrumentation, etc. Single-beam intensity measurement followed by phase retrieval techniques is attractive for wavefront sensing and reconstruction, including applications with low coherence. We use this method to construct a 3D microscope using volume speckle fields. Transparent phase objects are investigated using this principle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the application of this principle applied to microscopy. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America