Wollaston prism-based structured illumination microscope with tunable frequency

Abstract

© 2019 Optical Society of America. This work proposes an alternative structured illumination (SI) system based on a Wollaston prism (WP) illuminated by the diffracted field of an incoherent linear source. The proposed WP-based SI system presents several advantages. First, the generated fringes can be approximated by a pure sinusoidal pattern; thereby, computational methods developed for sinusoidal SI can be used without the need for additional processing. Second, the SI pattern’s period can be continuously varied up to the cutoff frequency of the native widefield system. Most significantly, the phase shifting of the SI pattern required for demodulation in SI microscopy can be easily accomplished using a de Sénarmont compensator, which provides accurate lateral displacement of the fringes independently of the lateral modulation frequency. Experimental verifications confirm the presented theoretical predictions.