Ghost Diffraction Holography: A Correlation Assisted Quantitative Tool for Complex Field Imaging and Characterization

The fascinating domain of ghost imaging has been a subject of interest in the fundamental and applied research for the last two decades with its promising applications in various imaging and characterization scenarios. In this chapter, we discuss the recently developed ghost diffraction holography (GDH) system with due emphasis on the capability of quantitative complex-field imaging in the ghost framework. The development of the unconventional correlation-assisted GDH technique by adopting the holography concept in ghost diffraction scheme is described, and the quantitative phase imaging capability is demonstrated in the microscopy. In addition, the technique exploits the spatial statistics of time-frozen recorded speckle intensity with snapshot detection in ghost framework, which could broaden the applications of the developed microscopy to real-time imaging of two- and three-dimensional biological samples with high resolution. Furthermore, we discuss demonstrated applications of the technique in the imaging various spatially varying complex-valued macroscopic and microscopic samples and the potential application of the technique in the recovery and characterization of orbital angular momentum modes encoded in spatially incoherent speckle field.