With the improvement in microscopy application and industrial production technologies, many products related to optical components have been developed. Because of the commercial application, compact systems and bottom-up technologies represent the golden standard for the manufacturing of optical devices. Moreover, the use of polymeric materials combines two main advantages: reduce the fabrication cost and improve the flexibility in terms of geometry and dimension of the optical components. Recently, innovative approaches have been considered for the production of micro-lens array in a single step and one of the best candidates for the array preparation is based on the self-assembling activated onto a polymeric film. The aforementioned paradigm has been growing rapidly, representing a single step procedure that avoids the fabrication of mold and multi-steps procedures for shaping and curing the polymer material. In this framework, we present an innovative strategy for the self-assembling of polymeric micro-lens array starting from a thin polymeric film. The shaping and curing of the microstructures is guided by the pyro-electric effect activated onto a periodically poled Lithium Niobate crystal. The complete characterization of polymeric arrays of different geometries and dimension is reported as a function of the experimental conditions. Moreover, digital holography is implemented to provide the optical properties of the lenses; Based on this strategy, we performed a series experiments of lens formation controlling completely avoiding the use of electrodes, molds and costly equipment.
Lately, Integral-Imaging systems have shown very promising capabilities of capturing the 3D structure of micro- scopic and macroscopic scenes. The aim of this work is to provide an optimal design for 3D-integral microscopy with extended depth of field and enhanced lateral resolution. By placing an array of microlenses at the aperture stop of the objective, this setup provides a set of orthographic views of the 3D sample. Adopting well known integral imaging reconstruction algorithms it can be shown that the depth of field as well as spatial resolution are improved with respect to conventional integral microscopy imaging. Our claims are supported on theoretical basis and experimental images of a resolution test target, and biological samples.
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