Patent ID: 8837045

Claim:
A diffraction phase microscope comprising: a. a temporally incoherent source of an illuminating beam for illuminating a specimen; b. an objective lens for collecting light from the source transmitted through the specimen and forming an image at an output port; c. a grating for relaying a zeroth order beam and for diffracting the image into a first-order diffracted beam; d. a first Fourier lens for transforming the zeroth-order beam and first-order diffracted beam into respective Fourier transform fields in a Fourier transform plane; e. a Fourier transform space mask for low-pass filtering one of the zeroth-order beam and the first-order beam in the Fourier transform plane; and f. a second Fourier lens for recombining the zeroth-order beam and first-order diffracted beam at a focal plane detector.