Polarization control methods in structured illumination microscopy

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) is one of the most promising super-resolution techniques, owing to its advantages of fast imaging speed and weak photo bleaching. The quality of the SIM image is greatly dependent on the contrast of the sinusoidal fringe illumination patterns. Low fringe contrast illumination will seriously affect the super-resolution result and lead to additional artifacts. The generation of fringe patterns with high contrast is the key requirement in hardware for the SIM technique. This can be done by the interference of two laser beams diffracted from the phase gratings addressed on a spatial light modulator. Meanwhile, for maximal interference contrast, precise polarization control to maintain s-polarization for different fringe orientations is critical. In this paper, we review several typical polarization control methods in SIM, and propose a new method by using a zero-order vortex half-wave retarder (VHR). Compared with the other methods, the presented VHR-based polarization control method is very efficient in terms of simple system configuration, ease of use, and high light energy utilization efficiency near to 100%.