Abstract

We present results for a new type of fiber-coupled stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope which uses a single fiber to transport STED and excitation light, as well as collect the fluorescence signal. Our method utilizes two higher-order eigenmodes of polarization maintaining (PM) fiber to generate the doughnut-shaped STED beam. The modes are excited with separate beams that share no temporal coherence, yielding output that is independent of fiber bending. We measured the resolution using 45 nm fluorescent beads and found a median bead image size of 116 nm. This resolution does not change as function of fiber bending radius, demonstrating robust operation. We report, for the first time, STED images of fixed biological samples collected in the epi-direction through fiber. Our microscope design shows promise for future use in super-resolution micro-endoscopes and in vivo neural imaging in awake and freely-behaving animals.

Details

Title
A Fiber-Coupled Stimulated Emission Depletion Microscope for Bend-Insensitive Through-Fiber Imaging
Author
Heffernan, Brendan M 1 ; Meyer, Stephanie A 2 ; Restrepo, Diego 3 ; Siemens, Mark E 4 ; Gibson, Emily A 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Gopinath, Juliet T 5 

1  Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA 
2  Department of Bioengineering, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA 
3  Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA 
4  Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA 
5  Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA; Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA 
Pages
1-8
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Jul 2019
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47319-w
ProQuest document ID
2267389363
Copyright
© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.