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A special class of tunable liquid microlenses is presented here. The microlenses are generated by an electrowetting effect under an electrode-less configuration and they exhibit two different regimes that are named here as separated lens regime (SLR) and wave-like lens regime (WLR). The lens effect is induced by the pyroelectricity of polar dielectric crystals, as was proved in principle in a previous work by the same authors (S. Grilli et al., Opt. Express 16, 8084, 2008). Compared to that work, the improvements to the experimental set-up and procedure allow to reveal the two lens regimes which exhibit different optical properties. A digital holography technique is used to reconstruct the transmitted wavefront during focusing and a focal length variation in the millimetre range is observed. The tunability of such microlenses could be of great interest to the field of micro-optics thanks to the possibility to achieve focus tuning without moving parts and thus favouring the miniaturization of the optical systems.

An approach that uses an electro-optically tunable two dimensional phase grating to enhance the resolution in digital holographic microscopy is proposed. We show that, by means of a flexible hexagonal phase grating, it is possible to increase the numerical aperture of the imaging system, thus improving the spatial resolution of the images in two dimensions. The augment of the numerical aperture of the optical system is obtained by recording spatially multiplexed digital holograms. The grating tuneability allows one to adjust the intensity among the spatially multiplexed holograms maximizing the grating diffraction efficiency. Furthermore we demonstrate that the flexibility of the numerical reconstruction allows one to use selectively the diffraction orders carrying useful information for increasing the spatial resolution. The proposed approach can improve the capabilities of digital holography in three-dimensional imaging and microscopy.

Combining the concept of lateral shear interferometry (LSI) within a digital holography microscope, we demonstrate that it is possible to obtain quantitative optical phase measurement in microscopy by a new single-image-processing procedure. Numerical lateral shear of the reconstructed wavefront in the image plane makes it possible to retrieve the derivative of the wavefront and remove the defocus aberration term introduced by the microscope objective. The method is tested to investigate a silicon structure and a mouse cell line.

We demonstrate experimentally that correct phase imaging without 2pi ambiguity is obtainable in digital holography by using a multiwavelength approach in the microscope configuration. We describe a general approach for removing chromatic aberrations and for controlling the pixel size of the reconstructed phase image in multiwavelength digital holography when the Fourier transform method is adopted for the numerical reconstruction of digital holograms. The retrieved phase is affected by the unavoidable, unwanted chromatic aberration. The correct phase can be obtained by evaluating the phase from the reference holograms reconstructed at different wavelengths to compensate for the chromatic aberration.

We present three-dimensional (3D) image fusion by use of digital holography. We demonstrate experimentally that, through the image fusion technique with multiresolution wavelet decomposition, it is possible to increase the details and contrast of 3D reconstructed images obtained by multiwavelength digital holography. Although there is substantial activity in the fields of image fusion and holography, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of 3D image fusion by use of digital holography.

In color digital holography the recording and reconstruction of three holograms, by an optical setup operating in multi-wavelength mode, is necessary. Incorrect superposition of different images at various wavelengths may occur due to the presence of chromatic aberrations. We demonstrate that the compensation of the chromatic aberrations can be achieved by using all of the information contained in the multi-wavelength digital holograms. Chromatic aberration is extracted from phase maps reconstructed at different wavelengths, resulting in perfect full color amplitude reconstructions. The method has important applications in color 3-D holographic imaging and display. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The principle of the digital holography (DH) technique and the potentialities of the method are considered. Experimental results obtained using the DH microscopy technique for characterizing microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital holograms recorded with a charge-coupled device array are numerically reconstructed in amplitude and phase through calculation of the Fresnel-Kirchhoff integral. The flexibility offered by the reconstruction process in digital holography allows exploitation of new possibilities of application in microscopy. Through the reconstruction process we will show that it is possible to control image parameters as focus distance, image size, and image resolution. Those explored potentialities open further the novel prospective of application of digital holography in single- and multiwavelengths operation either for display or metrological applications. We demonstrate the concept of controlling parameters in image reconstruction of digital holograms in some real situations for inspecting silicon microelectronic-mechanical systems structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A phase grating is produced in an iron-doped lithium niobate photorefractive crystal by two-beam holographic configuration. Digital holography is used to investigate the two-dimensional profile of index of refraction produced by the photorefractive process. The proposed technique gives a direct and quantitative two-dimensional profile of index of refraction in photorefractive structures, can monitor defects and can be used for in situ visualization during the photorefractive process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on the evaluation of internal electric field of a ferroelectric engineered-domain in a LiNbO3 wafer crystal by detecting optical path length variation with a noninvasive interferometric inspection method. The lithium niobate wafer has been patterned and subjected to electric field poling to obtain two antiparallel ferroelectric domains separated by a single domain wall. The crystal has been mounted into one arm of a Mach–Zehnder-type interferometer to study the phase map and evaluate the effects of domain reversion by a digital holographic technique. Evaluation of the internal field and consequent variation of the electro-optical properties of the different domains is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We present, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, a phase unwrapping method based on an algorithm which makes use of Green''s first identity. This method aims at recovering the correct phase information encoded in a fringe pattern after digital holography (DH) numerical processing. DH provides a quantitative measurement of the three-dimensional surface profile of objects. The information about the profile can be obtained in principle from the phase-map. However, the measured phase-map provides the actual phase values wrapped mod.2π so that an unwrapping process is required in order to reconstruct the object profile. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]