At Photonics West 2020, the Dynamic Optics and Photonics Group at the University of Oxford presented the first results of using our Deformable Phase Plate for multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) in a microscope.
Why more than one corrector
A single corrector at the pupil holds only over the isoplanatic patch — the region of the field across which the aberration is effectively the same. Beyond it the correction is the wrong one, and the corrected field stays small. MCAO puts several correctors in the beam path, each conjugated to a different aberrating layer, so that one setting serves a much larger field. In microscopy the approach had stayed at the simulation level: fitting two or three deformable mirrors, with their folded beam paths and relay optics, into an already complex instrument is rarely practical.
The Oxford group combined a deformable mirror with a transmissive DPP. The DPP sits in line, adds no fold to the beam path, and takes the second conjugate plane without the optomechanics a second mirror would need. That is what brings MCAO within reach of a working microscope — and with it aberration correction over a large field of view.
Original publication: “Closed-loop multi-conjugate adaptive optics for microscopy”, https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2544391
Links:
Dynamic Optics and Photonics Group at the University of Oxford: https://eng.ox.ac.uk/dop
