Shaw, M; O'Holleran, K; Paterson, C* (2013) Investigation of the confocal wavefront sensor and its application to biological microscopy. Opt. Express, 21 (16). pp. 19353-19362.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Wavefront sensing in the presence of background light sources is complicated by the need to restrict the effective depth of field of the wavefront sensor. This problem is particularly significant for direct wavefront sensing adaptive optic schemes for correcting imaging aberrations in biological microscopy. One solution is to use a confocal optical arrangement to provide optical sectioning. In this paper we investigate properties of a generalized confocal wavefront sensor (CWFS). We show that for small aberration amplitudes the pinhole approximately behaves as an ideal low pass filter of the spatial frequencies in the wavefront and examine departures from this behavior due to the finite numerical aperture of the optical system and for large aberration amplitudes. Using a simple model of biological wavefront statistics we show that effective wavefront sensing of low order Zernike modes is feasible with the sizes of pinholes typically used in confocal imaging. We discuss some of the practical implications of these results for adaptive optic systems in microscopy.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Active or Adaptive Optics, Spatial filtering, Confocal Microscopy, Fourier optics and signal processing
Subjects:	Biotechnology Biotechnology > Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing and Characterisation
Identification number/DOI:	10.1364/OE.21.019353
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2018 13:14
URI:	https://eprintspublications.npl.co.uk/id/eprint/5909