Abstract
A novel procedure for shaping the axial component of the point spread function of nonparaxial focusing systems by use of phase-only pupil filters is presented. The procedure is based on the Toraldo technique for tailoring focused fields. The resulting pupil filters consist of a number of concentric annular zones with constant real transmittance. The number of zones and their widths can be adapted according to the shape requirements. Our method is applied to design filters that produce axial superresolution in confocal scanning systems.
Highlights
Controlling the structure of the three-dimensional (3D) region that surrounds the focus of an optical system, i.e. the 3D point spread function (PSF), has long been the aim of many research efforts
When dealing with imaging systems designed to obtain the image of 3D samples, the transverse resolution and the axial resolution is of great interest
The Toraldo method has been further applied for shaping the transverse PSF [13,14], and the axial PSF [15,16,17]
Summary
Controlling the structure of the three-dimensional (3D) region that surrounds the focus of an optical system, i.e. the 3D point spread function (PSF), has long been the aim of many research efforts. When dealing with imaging systems designed to obtain the image of 3D samples, the transverse resolution and the axial resolution is of great interest. In this context the design of pupil filters for obtaining axial superresolution was the purpose of many scientific contributions [3,4,5,6]. Another purpose was tailoring the whole 3D PSF [7,8,9,10,11]. Since the axial PSF is a matter of interest in 3D imaging systems in which the lenses have high numerical aperture, such as confocal microscopy, we have extended the Toraldo method to the case of nonparaxially focused fields
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