Snapshot Temporally Compressive Phase Imaging Based on Serial Modulation Multiplexing

A phase‐imaging approach is proposed that allows retrieval of dozens of wavefields from a single diffraction frame. The approach is based on coherent modulation imaging (CMI), with an additional regularization constraint incorporated in its iterative algorithm. In a demonstration experiment, a total of 26 complex wavefields were retrieved from a single diffraction recording with quality similar to that of conventional CMI. It is shown that 50 wavefields were possible in simulations, corresponding to an oversampling ratio of 0.36. We also successfully employed this approach to measure the transient behavior of a spatial light modulator (SLM) at a temporal resolution of 2 ms using a 15 Hz frame‐rate detector. The method would be suitable for studying the dynamics of biological samples or energy materials using pulsed lasers, such as MHz free‐electron lasers, which have a much higher repetition rate than compatible area detectors.