Adaptive temporal and wavefront aberration correction for ultrafast lasers with a membrane deformable mirror

Two adaptive optic systems for correction of either temporal phase error and wavefront errors for ultrafast pulses are demonstrated. These systems consists of a computer controlled micromachined membrane deformable mirror (MMDM) and a genetic learning algorithm (GA). Nonlinear excitation such as two-photon fluorescence or second harmonic generation are used as feedback to the GA to determine the appropriate correction to apply to the mirror. Two MMDMs are used, a 30 x 8 mm, 39 actuator linear MMDM for pulse-shaping applications and a 15 mm diameter, 37 actuator wavefront MMDM.; Linear pre-compensation of self-phase modulation (SPM) was experimentally demonstrated utilizing the linear MMDM in a linear pulse-shaper for ultrafast pulses. The nonlinear nature of SPM makes arbitrary polynomial compensation necessary. Pre-compensation of SPM generated in an optical fiber by a 10 fs pulse reduced the pulse from 30fs to 20fs.; We demonstrates adaptive correction with the wavefront MMDM by corrected for coma and astigmatism in a reflective multiphoton scanning microscope. An f1, parabola produces a very tight focus with no aberration when it is perfectly aligned. However, when beam scanning is used for two-dimensional imaging the image is severely aberrated. The MMDM and the GA are able to find the best possible wavefront for aberration correction for each scanning position. The horizontal scanning range was increased from 60 μm without the adaptive correction to 170 μm, ≈3 times the uncorrected scanning range, and the vertical scanning range was increased by a comparable amount. This resulted in an increase in scanning area of 9 times.; The wavefront MMDM was also used for adaptive correction of spherical aberration from focusing from air, deep into a water-based sample. This depth-based aberration results from an index of refraction mismatch between the sample and the immersion medium of the objective and occurs regardless of beam scanning or sample scanning. By dynamically correcting for the first order spherical aberration in a water-Cumarin dye solution, the depth that can be imaged with a 40x/0.6NA objective was extended from 150 μm to 600 μm.; Adaptive aberration correction for photodisruption is also being investigated for ophathalmological and micromachining applications.