Dynamic control of illumination beam phase profile in a scanning optical microscope

Abstract

We propose a scanning optical microscope, for samples introducing spatially varying aberrations to the illumination beam. It is implemented with a microscope that has binary hologram based beam scanning mechanism where illumination beam phase profile is varied from pixel to pixel. Unlike a conventional scanning microscope, the scanning is achieved by the beam diffracted from a binary hologram written on the display panel of a liquid crystal spatial light modulator. The aberration correction is achieved without a separate wavefront sensor. For correcting the aberration in the illumination beam the signal is maximized by changing the shape of the binary hologram in terms of chosen Zernike mode coefficients.