Synthetic holography in microscopy: opportunities arising from advanced wavefront shaping

The advent of computer-generated or synthetic holography has created a wealth of possibilities for wavefront shaping in optics. We discuss the impact this has had on optical microscopy. Synthetic Holographic Microscopy utilises wavefront shaping by a computer-generated ‘hologram’ (CGH) to modify light on the illumination or the detection side, or both. This enables modifications of the general sample appearance concerning contrast, resolution and other aspects. Multiplexing CGHs can perform several tasks at once, for instance splitting the image into sub-images corresponding to different depths in the sample, or displaying differently contrasted images of the sample, e.g. bright field, darkfield or (spiral) phase contrast, in different sub-images. We give an overview of the options and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using programmable holographic elements inside an optical microscope.