Incoherent lateral shearing digital holographic microscopy

The ability to resolve and quantify features at submicrometer scales from a single-shot image is crucial for real-time uncovering intricate structures in unlabeled biological samples and analyzing them at the subcellular level. We introduce a novel incoherent quantitative phase imaging technique based on lateral shearing digital holographic microscopy, with shearing distances exceeding the coherence area of the employed illumination -- a regime not previously achieved and exploited. This strategy consequently assures artifacts-free, high-accuracy, and high-resolution quantitative phase reconstructions. This regime extends the single-shot lateral shearing digital holographic microscopy towards incoherent illumination, thus increasing the space-time bandwidth product of the method. The practical common-path geometry also provides enhanced vibration resistance, which is essential for consistent time-lapse measurements. We verify the scalability and effectiveness of the method by investigating samples via multiple condenser-objective pairs, providing a wide range of lateral resolutions and fields of view, thereby assuring its applicability for various microscope settings. We experimentally verify long-term phase stability and unprecedented phase-reconstruction accuracy. Finally, we use our method for investigation of biological samples, including cheek cells, diatoms, and yeast cells, highlighting its potential for dynamic label-free analysis at the organelle level.