Correlation plenoptic microscopy

We present a new technique for performing three-dimensional optical microscopy based on correlation plenoptic imaging. This approach, named Correlation Plenoptic Microscopy (CPM), exploits correlations between intensity fluctuations of pseudo-thermal light to retrieve plenoptic information about the sample, i. e. both spatial information about the intensity distribution of light and angular information about the propagation direction of the light rays. This leads to an enhancement of the depth of field, overcoming the sacrifice of lateral resolution required in conventional plenoptic microscopy. The intrinsic capability to refocus out-of-focus planes of the sample enables scanning-free three-dimensional reconstruction with the resolution kept at the diffraction limit. We show a setup to perform CPM with a microscope objective and present calculations of the correlation function for this specific case. Moreover we demonstrate with simulations that CPM improves the resolution, for a given depth of field, with respect to conventional optical microscopy.