doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7615-9_FI06

ABSTRACT

The scattering effect and spherical aberration induced by refractiveindex mismatch between a specimen and its surroundings degrade the resolution of sectioning images in a conventional confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM). In our previous research, a Zeeman laser scanning confocal microscope (ZLSCM) was proposed. The proposed ZLSCM reduces specimen-induced scattering effect (H. F. Chang, et al., J. Microsc. 223, 26-32, 2006) and then specimen-induced spherical aberration (J. S. Wu, et al., Opt Express 18, 13136-13150, 2010). In this study, we demonstrate the ability of ZLSCM to simultaneously reduce specimen-induced spherical aberration and scattering effect. The method used is based on the features of the common path propagation of linear polarized photonpairs (LPPP) associated with the optical heterodyne detection. Three different kinds of gating (spatial coherence gating, polarization gating, and spatial pinhole gating) in ZLSCM not only reduce the wavefront deformation of the LPPP laser beam, but also increase the survivability of LPPP in scattering media. In experiments, we study the performance of ZLSCM on simultaneous reduction of scattering effect and spherical aberration as the LPPP laser beam is focused into a scattering medium at different depths. We compare the axial responses between ZLSCM and CLSM under the same conditions. These experiments verify that ZLSCM is able to simultaneously reduce specimen-induced spherical aberration and scattering effect.

Keywords: Zeeman laser, Microscope, Photon-pair, Spherical aberration, Scattering, Heterodyne.

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