Colaborations

The Planar Airy light-sheet Microscope

Light-sheet microscopy illuminates the specimen with a plane of light that is orthogonal to the detection objective. This significantly improves contrast and allows for rapid optical section with minimal sample exposure. However, the diffraction of the illumination leads to a trade-off between axial resolution and the field-of-view. Non-diffracting laser beams as the Airy beam can avoid this trade-off to maximize both resolution and field-of-view.

The Airy beam is perhaps best known for its curved trajectory. Ordinarly, a light-sheet created by an Airy beam is correspondingly curved. While this leads to optimal resolution for single-photon excitation, the curvature is impractical when two-photon excitation is used to image deeper into tissue. To address this issue, we created a planar Airy light-sheet from the propagation-invariant, yet curved, Airy beam. The technique we developed is now commercially available as part of M Squared Life’s Aurora™ system.

Funding

This project and Tom Vettenburg are supported by UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant MR/S034900/1.