Center for Relativistic Laser Science

ABC 2018

High-resolution optical imaging within thick objects has been a challenging task due to the short working distance of conventional high NA objective lenses. Lenses with a large physical diameter, such as microscope condensers, can feature both a large NA and a long working distance. However, such lenses suffer from strong aberrations. By performing the maximization operation on both forward and phase-conjugated waves, the aberration maps of the two condensers could be distinguished. At a source wavelength of 785 nm, we demonstrated wide-field transmission imaging with a spatial resolution of 372 nm to the long working distance of 1.6 mm. Our method of converting microscope condensers to high-quality objectives may facilitate increases in the imaging depths of super-resolution and expansion microscopes.