Second harmonic generation polarization microscopy by rotation of excitation light
Journal
Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE
Journal Volume
6442
Date Issued
2007
Author(s)
Abstract
When imaging anisotropic samples with a laser scanning optical microscope, the results are often affected by the polarization of the excitation light source. Quantifying the polarization dependence of biological fibrous material such as muscle and collagen allows us to gain molecular information at length scale below the resolution of optical microscopes. One problem associated with rotating the direction of linearly polarized excitation light for an epi-illuminated laser scanning microscope is due to the reflective properties of the main dichroic mirror. Depending on the direction of the incident polarization, the dichroic mirror can induce different amount of phase retardation, thus altering the desired output polarization. In this work, we theoretically determined the needed combination of wave plates and their angular positions to compensate for the effect of the dichroic mirror, thus achieving any arbitrary linear polarization angle for the excitation incident on sample.
SDGs
Type
conference paper