Abstract
This paper discusses the effect of hologram plane position on the tracking of particle motions in a 3D suspension using digital holography microscopy. We compare two optical configurations where the hologram plane is located either just outside the particle suspension or in the middle of the suspension. In both cases, we record two axially separated holograms using two cameras and subsequently adopt an iterative phase retrieval approach to solve the virtual image problem. We measure the settling motions of 2 mu m spheres in a 2 mm thick sample containing 300 to 1500 particles/mm3. We show that the optical setup where the hologram plane is located in the middle of the sam-ple provides superior tracking results compared to the other, including higher accuracy in the measurement of par-ticle displacement and longer particle trajectories. The accuracy of particle displacement increases by a maximum of 18%, and the trajectory length increases by a maximum of 16%. This superior outcome is due to the less overlap-ping of the diffraction patterns on the holograms when the separation distance between particles and the hologram plane is minimized. (c) 2022 Optica Publishing Group