Projects

Light sheet based microscopy has had a strong impact on the development of novel intelligent illumination methods in modern microscopy, which improved 3D image quality significantly. This led to an advance in the areas of developmental biology and 3-D cell biology, but also made the investigation of laser beam propagation through strongly scattering media come to the fore. Recently it could be shown, that the phase profile of a weekly focused laser beam had a strong influence on light scattering in inhomogeneous, weekly absorbing media. In particular, Bessel beams revealed an amazing capability of beam self-reconstruction and a penetration depth which was increased by about 50% relative to conventional Gaussian beams. However, Bessel beams carry a concentric ring system, which results in a loss of image contrast in light sheet microscopy. In this proposal we want to use linear optical methods to improve the quantity of illumination beams in light sheet microscopy by investigating intensively the dependency of computer- holographically generated phase profiles on the beam propagation properties. We aim to develop different read-out procedures for scattered light in different planes. Based on the extracted data, we then want to test and develop different wavefront correction procedures by feedback and iteration. The contrast diminishing influence of the ring system shall be reduced significantly by using a line-confocal detection system.