Ptychographic lens-less polarization microscopy

Abstract: Birefringence, an inherent characteristic of optically anisotropic materials, is widely utilized in various imaging applications ranging from material characterizations to clinical diagnosis. Polarized light microscopy enables high-resolution, high-contrast imaging of optically anisotropic specimens, but it is associated with mechanical rotations of polarizer/analyzer and relatively complex optical designs. Here, we present a novel form of polarization-sensitive microscopy capable of birefringence imaging of transparent objects without an optical lens and any moving parts. Our method exploits an optical mask-modulated polarization image sensor and single-input-state LED illumination design to obtain complex and birefringence images of the object via ptychographic phase retrieval. Using a camera with a pixel resolution of 3.45 um, the method achieves birefringence imaging with a half-pitch resolution of 2.46 um over a 59.74 mm^2 field-of-view, which corresponds to a space-bandwidth product of 9.9 megapixels. We demonstrate the high-resolution, large-area birefringence imaging capability of our method by presenting the birefringence images of various anisotropic objects, including a birefringent resolution target, liquid crystal polymer depolarizer, monosodium urate crystal, and excised mouse eye and heart tissues.