Search results for "Apodization"
showing 7 items of 27 documents
Quasi-spherical focal spot in two-photon scanning microscopy by three-ring apodization
2005
International audience; We present a beam-shaping technique for two-photon excitation (TPE) fluorescence microscopy. We show that by inserting a properly designed three-ring pupil filter in the illumination beam of the microscope, the effective optical sectioning capacity of such a system improves so that the point spread function gets a quasi-spherical shape. Such an improvement, which allows the acquisition of 3D images with isotropic quality, is obtained at the expense of only a small increase of the overall energy in the axial sidelobes. The performance of this technique is illustrated with a scanning TPE microscopy experiment in which the image of small beads is obtained. We demonstrat…
Tunable axial superresolution by annular binary filters. Application to confocal microscopy
1995
We present a set of annular binary pupil filters for increasing the axial resolving capacity of imaging systems. The filters consist of two transparent annuli of the same area. It is shown that by changing the area of the transparent regions it is possible to obtain a tunable reduction of the width of the central lobe of the axial point spread function of the imaging system. However, this reduction is accompanied by a severe increase of the strength of secondary lobes, what can make these filters not very useful when used in conventional imaging systems. That is why we propose to use these filters for apodizing confocal microscopy systems. It is shown that in this case an important reductio…
Axial resolution in two-color excitation fluorescence microscopy by phase-only binary apodization
2005
We study the effect of a kind of binary phase-only filters, the Toraldo filters, in two-color excitation fluorescence microscopy. We show that by simple insertion of a properly designed Toraldo filter in one of the illumination arms the axial resolution of the system is significantly improved. Specifically, the main peak of the point spread function is narrowed by 22% along the axial direction.
Manufacture of pupil filters for 3D beam shaping
2007
In a previous work we presented a new method for binarizing pupil filters designed to control the three-dimensional (3D) irradiance distribution in the focal volume of apodized systems. The method is based in the fact that the 3D amplitude point spread function of an axially-symmetrical system can be recovered entirely from a one-dimensional (1D) set of regularly spaced amplitude samples. Hence we proposed the use of 1D iterative Fourier transform algorithm to binarize a, properly mapped, version of the amplitude transmittance of the filter. The binary masks obtained consist of a set of opaque and transparent concentric annular zones. In this paper we have built two of these masks with oppo…
Three-dimensional superresolution by annular binary filters
1999
We present a new family of annular binary filters for improving the three-dimensional resolving power of optical systems. The filters, whose most important feature is their simplicity, permit to achieve a significant reduction, both in the transverse and in the axial direction, of the central lobe width of the irradiance point spread function of the system. The filters can be used for applications such as optical data storage or confocal scanning microscopy.
Ultrafast diffraction of tightly focused waves with spatiotemporal stabilization
2008
Experimental studies of ultrafast beam shaping have come about from the need to compensate diffraction-induced dispersive effects in femtosecond laser beams. From a theoretical point of view, chromatic matching of diffracted spherical waves in the vicinity of the geometrical focus is attained by applying conveniently dispersive boundary conditions in the far-field zone, a subject thoroughly analyzed in the paraxial regime. For applications demanding high spatial resolution, however, high-numerical-aperture microscope objectives may be employed instead and would lead to nonparaxiality of the focal wavefields. These circumstances have motivated our investigation. Concretely we report on prere…
Axial apodization in 4Pi-confocal microscopy by annular binary filters
2002
We present a novel technique for considerably decreasing the sidelobe height of the axial point-spread function of one-photon 4Pi-confocal microscopes. By means of a numerical example, in which the ratio between the excitation and the fluorescence wavelengths was set to epsilon = lambdaexc/lambdadet = 0.8, we show that simply inserting a pair of properly designed two-ring binary masks in the illumination set allows the height of the axial sidelobes to be reduced from 20% to 5% of the height of the central peak. This allows one to receive the full benefit of the strong narrowness of the central lobe provided by the 4Pi-confocal technique.