Abstract

Laser scanning microscopy is applied to various fields including life science, material science, and industrial field. Confocal laser scanning microscopy and multi-photon excitation microscopy have the optical sectioning capability, enabling three-dimensional (3D) image acquisition of specimens. In these techniques, 3D images are constructed from a series of two-dimensional (2D) images, acquired sequentially with changing the observation plane, which generally limits the acquisition speed of 3D images. We have recently developed a novel two-photon excitation microscope that utilizes a light needle spot with an extended focal depth and Airy beam conversion for fluorescent signals [1]. Owing to the self-bending and parabolic propagation of an Airy beam, axially resolved 3D images can be obtained from a single 2D raster scanning of a needle spot, which remarkably increases the acquisition speed. However, the self-bending propagation of an Airy beam suffers from the non-linear lateral shifting of the converted point spread function, resulting in the depth-dependent variation of the axial resolution in reconstructed images.

© 2022 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optica Publishing Group