We are very happy to announce that our recent paper: "Cascading optofluidic phase modulators for performance enhancement in refractive adaptive optics" has made it on the title page of SPIE, the international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology.

"Researchers from the University of Freiburg, Germany, have made a significant advance in AO microscopy through the demonstration of a new AO module comprising two deformable phase plates (DPPs)."

The SPIE homepage, with "Adaptive optics with cascading corrective elements" among the latest news stories.

The magazine describes the key innovation and the potential of ultra-thin adaptive optics elements:

"In this AO configuration, similar to hi-fidelity loudspeakers with separate woofer and tweeter units, one of the optical modulators is optimized for low-spatial frequency aberrations, while the second is used for high-frequency correction."

Figure from the paper: (a) the optical bench, in which laser light excites fluorescent micro-beads and the return path passes through two cascaded DPPs before the camera; (b) how each DPP flattens part of the distorted wavefront in turn; (c) images of the beads without and with adaptive optics, the corrected one resolving individual beads. Scale bar 20 micrometres.

Original news sources: "Adaptive optics with cascading corrective elements" https://spie.org/news/adaptive-optics-with-cascading-corrective-elements

You can read the open access paper here:

Original paper: "Cascading optofluidic phase modulators for performance enhancement in refractive adaptive optics" https://doi.org/10.1117/1.AP.2.6.066005