Study of spatial lateral resolution in off-axis digital holographic microscopy

The lateral resolution in digital holographic microscopy (DHM) has been widely studied in terms of both recording and reconstruction parameters. Although it is understood that once the digital hologram is recorded the physical resolution is fixed according to the diffraction theory and the pixel density, still some researches link the resolution of the reconstructed wavefield with the recording distance as well as with the zero-padding technique. Aiming to help avoiding these misconceptions, in this paper we analyze the lateral resolution of DHM through the variation of those two parameters. To support our outcomes, we have designed numerical simulations and experimental verifications. Both the simulations and the experiments confirm that DHM is indeed resolution invariant in terms of the recording distance and the zero-padding provided that it operates within the angular spectrum regime.