Phase-shifting interferometric holography of living cells

We present a phase-shifting holographic set-up for the microscopic imaging of adherent cells. The superposition of an object wave field and a reference wave is recorded on a digital sensor with three reference wave phases. The reference phases are then recovered by statistical analysis of the recorded intensities. Subsequently, the object wave phase is calculated by the generalized phase shifting algorithm. After phase unwrapping and background subtraction, the phase shift in troduced by the adherent cell culture is reconstructed. As the interferograms are recorded in the image plane of the microsope objective, the full lateral resolution is achieved in contrast to off-axis holography where the reconstruction requires numerical propagation for the separation of 0th and 1st order. Our approach uses three arbitrary unknown reference phases and poses thus minimum requirements on the mechanical and thermal stability of the set-up. We give preliminary results of images from a Vero cell line and pollen grains.