Application of a reflective microscope objective for multiphoton microscopy
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Published on: September 23, 2012
Mohammad M Kabir1, Aakash M Choubal2, Kimani C Toussaint2
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.
Abstract:
Reflective objectives (ROs) mitigate chromatic aberration across a broad wavelength range. Yet, a systematic performance characterisation of ROs has not been done. In this paper, we compare the performance of a 0.5 numerical-aperture (NA) reflective objective (RO) with a 0.55 NA standard glass objective (SO), using two-photon fluorescence (TPF) and second-harmonic generation (SHG). For experiments spanning ∼1 octave in the visible and NIR wavelengths, the SO leads to defocusing errors of 25-40% for TPF images of subdiffraction fluorescent beads and 10-12% for SHG images of collagen fibres. The corresponding error for the RO is ∼4% for both imaging modalities. This work emphasises the potential utility of ROs for multimodal multiphoton microscopy applications.
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