Field of view advantage of conjugate adaptive optics in microscopy applications

TL;DR

This paper compares pupil and conjugate adaptive optics in microscopy, showing conjugate AO offers a larger correction field of view for spatially variant aberrations, a benefit well known in astronomy but less so in microscopy.

Contribution

The paper provides a theoretical and experimental comparison of pupil and conjugate adaptive optics, highlighting the FOV advantage of conjugate AO in microscopy applications.

Findings

Conjugate AO significantly extends the correction field of view.

Pupil AO is less effective for spatially variant aberrations.

The results bridge knowledge from astronomy to microscopy.

Abstract

The imaging performance of an optical microscope can be degraded by sample-induced aberrations. A general strategy to undo the effect of these aberrations is to apply wavefront correction with a deformable mirror (DM). In most cases, the DM is placed conjugate to the microscope pupil, called pupil adaptive optics (AO). When the aberrations are spatially variant, an alternative configuration involves placing the DM conjugate to the main source of aberrations, called conjugate AO. We provide theoretical and experimental comparison of both configurations for the simplified case where spatially variant aberrations are produced by a well defined phase screen. We pay particular attention to the resulting correction field of view (FOV). Conjugate AO is found to provide a significant FOV advantage. While this result is well known in the astronomy community, our goal here is to recast it specifically for the optical microscopy community.