Highly stable lens-less digital holography using cyclic lateral shearing interferometer and residual decollimated beam

Lens-less digital holography for quantitative phase contrast imaging is established with a cyclic lateral shearing interferometer and non-collimated light beam. In a self-reference type configuration, the object and reference beams are generated from the same spherical wavefront after the light beam has passed through the sample plane. The experimental configuration is implemented with simple optical components involving beam splitter and mirrors. This proposed architecture has the advantage that the system does not require any special optical element such as pinhole, gratings, and other customized optical components and hence can be easily realized with significantly simplified alignment procedure. Experimental results for both amplitude and phase objects are presented as a proof of concept.