UCL Discovery

Abstract

This paper examines the use of Gauss-Laguerre beams in STED microscopy. These types of beams are shown to have beneficial properties that can be utilised to generate stable, high quality STED beams resulting in an aberration-resilient generation volume. In this paper we obtain general expressions for Gauss-Laguerre beams being focused through a stratified medium and describe their optimization for STED microscopy purposes. Our results show that the circularly polarised, lowest order "dark" beam is the most beneficial for STED purposes. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.