Thorlabs’ B-scope

Thorlabs’ scope pieces and kits have been mentioned in these pages before. At SfN, they had their new B-scope on display. This is like the Sutter MOM and the UCLA scope, in that the microscope rotates in one plane in addition to x-y-z movement. A few differences with the Thorlabs scope:

1. The objective rotates around the focal plane, and the rotation is motorized.
With the Sutter/UCLA style scopes, the objective rotates about an axis along the scan path, so the focus point changes a ton when rotating. The rotation can really only be changed before there is a prep on there, because the objective swings a big arc whenever the rotation changes and it ends up pointing at a completely different point in space.

By contrast, the Thorlabs scope is set up to rotate about an axis that is in the plane of focus. So you can be looking at a cell and then, while imaging, rotate the scope (since it’s motorized) and still keep looking at the same thing, just from a different angle.

This is why they have the crazy periscope you can see to the right in the photo below.

I remember seeing a scope with this same feature (rotation around an axis in the image plane) at a conference at least 2 years ago. I think it was a group based out of Switzerland. Can anyone fill in the details for me?

2. No conventional scanners, just the Thorlabs conventional scanners.
This might not be true for long. Thorlabs has their own conventional scanners, but they’re not as fast as Cambridge Technologies (CTI) scanners. This is probably why they opted to put their resonant scanners in the system.

I’m guessing that they’ll help out buyers if they want to fit the scope with a set of conventional scanners from CTI. I say this because Thorlabs told more than one person at SfN that they would help them fit the Thorlabs resonant scanner kit to their Sutter MOM scope. This was news to Sutter.