ELECTRO-OPTICS  LABORATORY

Optical sectioning and tomography have been considered sought-after characteristics in optical microscopy, providing in-depth clear images of thick objects slice-by-slice. However, the long scanning process of such systems has hindered their use in dynamic scenarios, which require sub-second temporal resolution to achieve video-rate tracking of an examined phenomenon (e.g., cell division, membrane fluctuations). Here, we upgrade a widefield microscope to have optical sectioning capacity by introducing pseudo-nondiffracting beams as the probing light. Mapping the entire volume of interest from a single viewpoint and without any kind of scanning is achieved by a sparse coded aperture correlation hologram of tilted pseudo-nondiffracting beams. Volumetric reconstructions of phantoms of transmissive thick objects and of a fluorescent specimen from a single-viewpoint bipolar hologram are demonstrated. The experiments confirm that the suggested instrument can perform optical sectioning and retrieve three-dimensional images even in challenging conditions such as obscured objects and low optical power.