Subwavelength resolution Fourier ptychography with hemispherical digital condensers

However, to date, the effective imaging numerical aperture (NA) achievable with a commercial LED board is still limited to the range of 0.3−0.7 with a 4×/0.1NA objective due to the geometric constraint with the declined illumination intensities and attenuated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

Thus the highest achievable half-pitch resolution is usually constrained between 500−1000 nm, which cannot meet the requirements of high-resolution biomedical imaging applications. Although it is possible to improve the resolution by using a high-NA objective lens, the FP approach is less appealing as the decrease of field-of-view (FOV) will far exceed the improvement of spatial resolution in this case. Herein, in this paper, we initially present a subwavelength resolution Fourier ptychography (SRFP) platform with a hemispherical digital condenser to provide high-angle programmable plane-wave illuminations of 0.95NA, attaining a 4×/0.1NA objective with the final effective imaging performance of 1.05NA at a half-pitch resolution of 244 nm with the incident wavelength of 465 nm across a wide FOV of 14.60 mm², corresponding to a SBP of 245 megapixels.