MIT on Importance of High Full Well in Interferometric Microscopy

Adimec interviews Poorya Hosseini of MIT to discuss the use of extreme high full well capacity camera in interferometric microscopy:

"There has been some debate on what typically limits the sensitivity of the phase measurements in interferometric microscopy and holographic microscopy that has been a few nm in terms of optical path length. We hypothesized that photon shot noise sets the current limit rather than other noise sources such as mechanical vibrations or power fluctuations of the illumination source. After some theoretical calculations and showing shot noise is indeed the limiting factor, we needed a tool to see how far we can push shot noise down before we hit the mechanical limits. This is only possible when you can collect a huge number of photons in a short period of time using this camera, and of course lots of light."