Structured light: seeing less to see more in optical microscopy

Optical microscopy techniques can be greatly enhanced from simply imaging what you see in the focus of a microscope objective by structuring the light that you use to illuminate the object. The classic example of this is the confocal microscope where a point illumination is used with a point detector to reject light that comes from outside the focal plane. That technique enables high-contrast, threedimensional imaging of an object, and can even achieve an improvement in resolution. This talk covers a range of techniques, some wide-field and some point scanning, but all loosely based on the confocal principle, that can achieve or even better the performance of the classic confocal microscope. While the confocal microscope most benefitted from the invention of the laser, we show how it is developments in optical components, detector technology and computational power that are enabling more recent developments, and opening up new possibilities for applications such as optical data storage.

Speaker Bios

Mark Neil studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before pursuing his PhD in optical information processing at the Engineering Department there. Moving to the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University he continued his work in optics as a post-doctoral researcher and college lecturer, before joining the Photonics Group in the Physics Department at Imperial in 2002, where he became Professor in 2009.

With such a broad academic background it is hardly surprising that he often finds himself working in multidisciplinary projects alongside engineers, medics, chemists and biologists and on problems as diverse as studying the inner workings of cancer cells to the manufacture of mirrors for forthcoming generations of extremely large astronomical telescopes. While imaging, microscopy and metrology are the mainstays of his work, underpinning this are technologies that enable the control of light by computer that are now changing how we view the potential applications of optical systems.