Three new publications on Adaptive Optics extensions for commercial microscopes

The Deformable Phase Plate (DPP) is a refractive wavefront modulator developed in our group and commercialized by Phaseform GmbH. The photograph shows a DPP integrated into a commercial Raman microscope.(Courtesy of Alexander Jesacher, Medical University of Innsbruck).

A major focus of our research in the last three years has been the development of refractive adaptive optics systems with novel hardware and software components. The core innovation enabling this work was a highly-miniaturized, electrostatically actuated optofluidic transmissive wavefront modulator called the Deformable Phase Plate (DPP). In a series of three recent publictions, we demonstrated complete, plug-and-play adaptive optics systems for commercial microscopes.

In all these cases, the DPP was coupled with different sensorless wavefront estimation techniques to minimize hardware modifications. In a straightforward implementation, we showed that a DPP located between an objective and the turret in a microscope successfully emulates a pupil-AO system for a wide-field microscope [1], and a confocal Raman microscope [2]. Refractive wavefront correction also uniquely allows conjugate-AO extensions for commercial microscopes, where the conjugate plane of the correction element can be easily shifted by moving the DPP along the optical axis. For the first time on a commercial microscope, we have shown that for cases where aberrations are dominated by a single conjugate plane, full-field correction of field-dependent aberrations is possible [3]. Again, for the first time in this work, the location of the conjugate plane has been identified by an optimization routine run over the axial position of the DPP.

You can download these open access publications through the links below:

[1] Dorn, Alex, Hans Zappe, and Çaglar Ataman. "Plug-and-play adaptive optics microscopy with full-field correction using isoplanatic patch estimation and field segmentation." Optics Express 32, no. 23 (2024): 41764-41775.

[2] Muñoz-Bolaños, Juan David, Pouya Rajaeipour, Kai Kummer, Michaela Kress, Çaglar Ataman, Monika Ritsch-Marte, and Alexander Jesacher. "Confocal Raman Microscopy with Adaptive Optics." ACS Photonics (2024).

[3] Dorn, Alex, Hans Zappe, and Çaglar Ataman. "Conjugate adaptive optics extension for commercial microscopes." Advanced Photonics Nexus 3, no. 5 (2024): 056018-056018.