Off-axis digital holographic microscopy with divided aperture.

• We reported an off-axis digital holographic microscopy with divided-aperture. • No element tilt is needed to produce the off-axis angle. • A complete analysis was done for the microscopic imaging system. • Experimental results show the validity of the proposed method. Divided-aperture (DA) microscopy is an imaging method that, in addition, improves the anti-scattering capability. The present state-of-the-art imaging methods have the drawbacks of requirement of scanning or low spatial resolution. In this paper, we propose a DA digital holographic microscopy (DADHM) to enable single shot quantitative phase imaging, which, to our knowledge, is the first-of-its-kind. The proposed system is built using a Linnik-type interferometric module associated with the DA technique. In this method, interestingly, an element tilt is not required to produce an off-axis angle between the sample and reference beams because of the employment of DA. Some analyses and experiments were conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed method, and the results indicate that a high anti-scattering capability with a mean error of 2.42 nm were achieved by the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]