Scanning-free three-dimensional fluorescent dipoles imaging by polarization self-interference digital holography (pSIDH)

Polarization microscopy provides insights into the structure and orientational organization of biomolecules and their architectures in cells. The above key functional signatures, which are natively 3D, can be only detected in 2D for a single measurement in conventional polarization microscopy. It is so far a challenging task to capture simultaneously the 3D structure and molecular orientation in a single frame of far-field intensity distribution, within the timescale of rapid-happened spatial organization events of bio-complexes. We report an optical imaging method called pSIDH, to encode multidimensional sample information includes 3D structures and dipole orientations, in their far-field fluorescence-self-interference pattern. The computational reconstruction from the holographic extracted complex-valued light field provides optical-aberration-corrected 3D polarization images of the sample. In pSIDH microscope incorporating planar liquid crystal lens and high numerical aperture objective, we demonstrate scanning-free 3D volumetric polarization imaging of fluorescently-labelled sample, with simultaneously computational-improved system measuring accuracy on the 3D spatial and polarization dimensions. The pSIDH imaging on phalloidin-fluorophore labelling U2OS cells provides rapid tools of capturing simultaneous the 3D structural details and spatial-averaged molecular orientation distributions of biological complex architectures such as actin filaments.