High speed wavefront sensorless aberration correction in digital micromirror based confocal microscopy.

The quality of fluorescence microscopy images is often impaired by the presence of sample induced optical aberrations. Adaptive optical elements such as deformable mirrors or spatial light modulators can be used to correct aberrations. However, previously reported techniques either require special sample preparation, or time consuming optimization procedures for the correction of static aberrations. This paper reports a technique for optical sectioning fluorescence microscopy capable of correcting dynamic aberrations in any fluorescent sample during the acquisition. This is achieved by implementing adaptive optics in a non conventional confocal microscopy setup, with multiple programmable confocal apertures, in which out of focus light can be separately detected, and used to optimize the correction performance with a sampling frequency an order of magnitude faster than the imaging rate of the system. The paper reports results comparing the correction performances to traditional image optimization algorithms, and demonstrates how the system can compensate for dynamic changes in the aberrations, such as those introduced during a focal stack acquisition though a thick sample.

Structured film for compensation of anthropogenic radiative forcing.

A possible solution for the global warming problem consists of scattering the solar radiation by a cloud of screens, placed near the inner Lagrange point (L1), between the sun and the earth. The thin film material for such a screen should have a high longevity in space environment, low areal density, high on-axis scattering, very low integral reflectivity over the whole solar spectrum, and good handling properties such as foldability and robustness. We report on experimental fabrication of free-standing robust nitride films satisfying to most optical and mechanical requirements for such a screen.

Model-based aberration correction in a closed-loop wavefront-sensor-less adaptive optics system.

In many scientific and medical applications, such as laser systems and microscopes, wavefront-sensor-less (WFSless) adaptive optics (AO) systems are used to improve the laser beam quality or the image resolution by correcting the wavefront aberration in the optical path. The lack of direct wavefront measurement in WFSless AO systems imposes a challenge to achieve efficient aberration correction. This paper presents an aberration correction approach for WFSlss AO systems based on the model of the WFSless AO system and a small number of intensity measurements, where the model is identified from the input-output data of the WFSless AO system by black-box identification. This approach is validated in an experimental setup with 20 static aberrations having Kolmogorov spatial distributions. By correcting N=9 Zernike modes (N is the number of aberration modes), an intensity improvement from 49% of the maximum value to 89% has been achieved in average based on N+5=14 intensity measurements. With the worst initial intensity, an improvement from 17% of the maximum value to 86% has been achieved based on N+4=13 intensity measurements.

Extracting hysteresis from nonlinear measurement of wavefront-sensorless adaptive optics system.

In many scientific and medical applications wavefront-sensorless adaptive optics (AO) systems are used to correct the wavefront aberration by optimizing a certain target parameter, which is nonlinear with respect to the control signal to the deformable mirror (DM). Hysteresis is the most common nonlinearity of DMs, which can be corrected if the information about the hysteresis behavior is present. We report a general approach to extract hysteresis from the nonlinear behavior of the adaptive optical system, with the illustration of a Foucault knife test, where the voltage-intensity relationship consists of both hysteresis and some memoryless nonlinearity. The hysteresis extracted here can be used for modeling and linearization of the AO system.

Light scanner based on a viscoelastic stretchable grating.

We present a new technique for light scanning by use of viscoelastic-based deformable phase diffraction gratings. Mechanical stretching of the grating permits control of its spatial period, and thus the orders of diffraction can be spatially deflected. In the experiments the viscoelastic gratings with triangular and rectangular profiles have been characterized at lambda = 633 nm. It is demonstrated that the reversible elongation can exceed 20% of the initial length. For the triangular profile grating, the diffraction angle of the first order changed from 6.6 degrees to 5.4 degrees while the diffraction efficiency remained almost constant at approximately 17%. Dynamic scanning of a laser beam at frequencies of approximately 1 kHz is demonstrated by use of electromechanically driven viscoelastic gratings.

Adaptive correction of human-eye aberrations in a subjective feedback loop.

An adaptive optical system with a subjective feedback loop is used to improve the visual acuity and to determine the aberrations of the human eye. Corrections of as many as 12 low-order aberration modes were made, based on the perceived sharpness of the test object observed through the adaptive optical system. The acuity of vision was improved by adjustment of the weights of the orthogonal modes produced by a deformable mirror. Objective measurements of the correcting aspherical figures, obtained in independent subjective correction cycles for one person, demonstrated good repeatability. Participants in the study with strong ocular aberrations reported moderate to significant improvement of their visual acuity, estimated with the U.S. Air Force 1951 acuity chart.

Single-mask microfabrication of aspherical optics using KOH anisotropic etching of Si.

We report on the microfabrication of continuous aspherical optical surfaces with a single-mask process, using anisotropic etching of silicon in a KOH water solution. Precise arbitrary aspherical surfaces with lateral scales on the order of several millimeters and a profile depth on the order of several micrometers were fabricated using this process. We discuss the factors defining the precision of the formed component and the resulting surface quality. We demonstrate 1 mm and 5 mm replicated aspherical phase plates, reproducing defocus, tilt, astigmatism and high-order aberrations. The technology has a potential for serial production of reflective and refractive arbitrary aspherical micro-optical components.

Modal liquid crystal wavefront corrector.

Results are presented of the properties of a liquid crystal wavefront corrector for adaptive optics. The device is controlled using modal addressing in which case the device behaves more like a continuous facesheet deformable mirror than a segmented one. Furthermore, the width and shape of the influence functions are electrically controllable. We describe the construction of the device, the optical properties, and we show experimental results of low order aberration generation.

Intracavity control of a 200-W continuous-wave Nd:YAG laser by a micromachined deformable mirror.

A silicon micromachined membrane deformable mirror with a diameter of 10 mm, reflectivity of better than 99.8%, and a surface deflection range of 3mum has been used for intracavity control of an industrial 200-W cw Nd:YAG laser. When it was placed in the resonator, the mirror demonstrated continuous (more than 40-h) stable operation under an ~550-W cw optical load, with beam diameters in the range 3-6 mm. Periodic modulation of the curvature of the deformable mirror with a frequency of 250 Hz produced quick switching between stable and unstable resonator configurations, which resulted in pulse-period Q -switched generation with average power in the range 50-200 W, modulation depth from 95% to 10%, and an M(2) parameter of 6.5 to 30.

Cryogenic wavefront correction using membrane deformable mirrors.

Micro-machined membrane deformable mirrors (MMDMs) are being evaluated for their suitability as wavefront correctors at cryogenic temperatures. Presented here are experimental results for the change in the initial mirror figure of 37-channel MMDMs from OKO Technologies upon cooling to T=78K. The changes in the influence functions are also explored. Of the sample of 3 mirrors tested, one was found to have sufficiently small initial static aberrations to be useful as a wavefront corrector at this temperature. The influence functions at T=78K were found to be similar in shape to both those at room temperature and theoretical predictions of the MMDMs surface shape. The magnitude of the surface deflection at T=78K was reduced by around 20% compared with room temperature values.

Shaped-pulse optimization of coherent emission of high-harmonic soft X-rays

When an intense laser pulse is focused into a gas, the light-atom interaction that occurs as atoms are ionized results in an extremely nonlinear optical process--the generation of high harmonics of the driving laser frequency. Harmonics that extend up to orders of about 300 have been reported, some corresponding to photon energies in excess of 500 eV. Because this technique is simple to implement and generates coherent, laser-like, soft X-ray beams, it is currently being developed for applications in science and technology; these include probing the dynamics in chemical and materials systems and imaging. Here we report that by carefully tailoring the shapes of intense light pulses, we can control the interaction of light with an atom during ionization, improving the efficiency of X-ray generation by an order of magnitude. We demonstrate that it is possible to tune the spectral characteristics of the emitted radiation, and to steer the interaction between different orders of nonlinear processes.

Smart microscope: an adaptive optics learning system for aberration correction in multiphoton confocal microscopy.

Off-axis aberrations in a beam-scanning multiphoton confocal microscope are corrected with a deformable mirror. The optimal mirror shape for each pixel is determined by a genetic learning algorithm, in which the second-harmonic or two-photon fluorescence signal from a reference sample is maximized. The speed of the convergence is improved by use of a Zernike polynomial basis for the deformable mirror shape. This adaptive optical correction scheme is implemented in an all-reflective system by use of extremely short (10-fs) optical pulses, and it is shown that the scanning area of an f:1 off-axis parabola can be increased by nine times with this technique.

Adaptive pulse compression for transform-limited 15-fs high-energy pulse generation.

We demonstrate the use of a deformable-mirror pulse shaper, combined with an evolutionary optimization algorithm, to correct high-order residual phase aberrations in a 1-mJ, 1-kHz, 15-fs laser amplifier. Frequency-resolved optical gating measurements reveal that the output pulse duration of 15.2 fs is within our measurement error of the theoretical transform limit. This technique significantly reduces the pulse duration and the temporal prepulse energy of the pulse while increasing the peak intensity by 26%. It is demonstrated, for what is believed to be the first time, that the problem of pedestals in laser amplifiers can be addressed by spectral-domain correction.

Pulse compression by use of deformable mirrors.

An electrostatically deformable, gold-coated, silicon nitride membrane mirror was used as a phase modulator to compress pulses from 92 to 15 fs. Both an iterative genetic algorithm and single-step dispersion compensation based on frequency-resolved optical gating calibration of the mirror were used to compress pulses to within 10% of the transform limit. Frequency-resolved optical gating was used to characterize the pulses and to test the range of the deformable-mirror-based compressor.

Liquid-crystal adaptive lenses with modal control.

We report on a novel approach to the realization of nematic liquid-crystal (LC) phase correctors to form spherical and cylindrical wave fronts. A LC cell with a distributed reactive electrical impedance was driven by an ac voltage applied to the cell boundary to yield the desired spatial distribution of the refractive index. The two-dimensional function of the phase delay introduced into the light beam depends on the frequency of the ac control voltage, the geometry of the boundary electrode surrounding the LC cell, and the electrical parameters of the cell. We realized a cylindrical adaptive lens with a clear aperture of 15 mm x 4mm and a spherical adaptive lens with circular aperture of 6.5 mm. Both devices are capable of focusing collimated light in the range infinity...0.5 m.

Wave-front correction of femtosecond terawatt lasers by deformable mirrors.

Wave-front correction and focal spot improvement of femtosecond laser beams have been achieved, for the first time to our knowledge, with a deformable mirror with an on-line single-shot three-wave lateral shearing interferometer diagnostic. Wave-front distortions of a 100-fs laser that are due to third-order nonlinear effects have been compensated for. This technique, which permits correction in a straightforward process that requires no feedback loop, is also used on a 10-TW Ti:sapphire-Nd:phosphate glass laser in the subpicosecond regime. We also demonstrate that having a focal spot close to the diffraction limit does not constitute a good criterion for the quality of the laser in terms of peak intensity.

Multichannel liquid-crystal-based wave-front corrector with modal influence functions.

We report on a multichannel liquid-crystal-based wave-front corrector with smooth modal influence functions. The phase is controlled by application of spatially localized ac voltages to a distributed voltage divider formed by a liquid-crystal layer sandwiched between a high-conductance and a low-conductance electrode. The shape of the influence function depends on the control frequency and material parameters of the distributed voltage divider. We have experimentally realized a reflective modulator controlled by an array of 16 x 16 electrodes, providing phase control with an amplitude of approximately 16 pi at lambda =633 nm with a time constant of the order of tens of milliseconds. We experimentally demonstrated that the amplitude of each influence function can be controlled by change of the control voltage, whereas the width of the influence function is controlled by the frequency of the control voltage in a range of approximately 1 mm to the full width of the modulator aperture.

Reconstruction of an object shape from the near-field intensity of a reflected paraxial beam.

Experimental reconstruction of an object shape from the near-field intensity of reflected or transmitted light is reported. The method of reconstruction is based on the direct numerical solution of the finite-difference representation of the paraxial irradiance-transport equation. Practical applications and limitations of the method are discussed.

Flexible mirror micromachined in silicon.

An electrostatically controlled flexible mirror has been fabricated on a silicon chip by means of bulk micromachining. The mirror has a 10.5 mm × 10.5 mm square aperture and consists of a 0.5-µm-thick tensile-stressed silicon-nitride diaphragm coated with a 0.2-µm-thick reflective aluminum layer. The reflecting surface is initially plane with a mean-square deviation of ~λ/8 for λ = 633 nm. The shape of the reflecting surface is controlled electrostatically by an array of integrated actuators. Good initial optical quality and the possibility of electrostatic control of the reflecting surface make the on-chip mirror useful for various electro-optical applications.