The smallest practical microscope is demonstrated here, in a work led by Instrumentation Systems and Communications (SIC) group. In contrast to standard lensless microscopy, the object is located near the lighting source. Raster optical microscopy is applied by using a single-pixel detector and a microdisplay. Contrarily to other sort of digital lensless holographic microscopes, light backpropagation is not required to reconstruct the images of the sample. In a mm-high microscope, resolutions down to 800 nm have been demonstrated even when measuring with detectors as large as 138 μm × 138 μm, with field of view given by the display size.
A Compact Raster Lensless Microscope Based on a Microdisplay. Vilà, A., Moreno, S., Canals, J., Diéguez, A. Sensors 2021, 21(17), 5941