Planar Airy beam light-sheet for two-photon microscopy
Neveen A. Hosny, James A. Seyforth, Gunnar Spickermann, Thomas J. Mitchell, Pedro Almada, Robert Chesters, Scott J. Mitchell, George Chennell, Anthony C. Vernon, Kwangwook Cho, Deepak P. Srivastava, Robert Forster, Tom Vettenburg
Abstract
We demonstrate the first planar Airy light-sheet microscope. Fluorescence light-sheet microscopy has become the method of choice to study large biological samples with cellular or sub-cellular resolution. The propagation-invariant Airy beam enables a ten-fold increase in field-of-view with single-photon excitation; however, the characteristic asymmetry of the light-sheet limits its potential for multi-photon excitation. Here we show how a planar light-sheet can be formed from the curved propagation-invariant Airy beam. The resulting symmetric light sheet excites two-photon fluorescence uniformly across an extended field-of-view without the need for deconvolution. We demonstrate the method for rapid two-photon imaging of large volumes of neuronal tissue.