Digital holographic microscopy of optically trapped three-dimensional microstructures

Digital holographic microscopy (DHM) provides a non-destructive and quantitative phase contrast imaging that is suitable for high resolving investigations of living cells. On the other hand, for many applications including cell analysis the immobilization of the sample under study is a crucial task. Optical trap is an elegant candidate to immobilize the micro samples. In this work, DHM is integrated with an optical trapping setup. This combination is of particular advantage for quantitative visualization of three dimensional structures that are trapped by laser beam. The recorded hologram by CCD can be post-processed to three dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the trapped objects.