Custom scan optics for two-photon imaging
Adrian Negrean, in Huibert Mansvelder’s lab, has been designing and building custom scan optics for two-photon imaging and earlier this year published his work (paper). Labrigger wants to emphasize how nice this paper is. It’s an easy read, with clear figures, and offers a lot of practical insights. It has a ton of information and we highly recommend reading it. Even if you don’t copy the exact design they present, there is almost certainly information and ideas you can use to optimize your designs.
SLAB has been doing a lot of custom optical design recently, and this paper has been a great resource. If you want to know more about what SLAB has been up to, come to the Short Course workshop at the SfN meeting.
Nice! I’ve been basing my scope-designs on that same paper. If I could change one aspect of the paper it would be the focus on correcting broadband achromatism, which I don’t care about as much as large scan angles. I don’t need to scan the excitation laser across a wide range within one experiment, and If I did I’d be OK with correcting focus & scale. I would rather minimise lens aberrations (chromatic/temporal) within the laser bandwidth (< 50 nm) for a larger scan angle (or larger aperture). Chromatic lens aberrations could cause pulse-widths to be inhomogenous across the FOV (temporally longer pulses and spatially smeared foci at the edges), which cannot be pre-compensated by a pre-chirper.
We’ve been working on this. Our optical systems are optimized to minimize aberrations for a narrow bandwidth that we use for excitation, across the full FOV of the objective.
We still find Adrian’s paper very useful. We just optimize for our application.
For this work, we like Zemax, and they have a demo you can download.
http://www.zemax.com/support/downloads/download-demo
Alternatively, there’s the free version of OSLO.
http://www.lambdares.com/buy/educators-and-students