Light tailored by multimode fiber for multiphoton fluorescence microscopy

Abstract

We study the diffraction of a particular class of beams, composed only by a combination of azimuthally invariant guided modes of an optical fiber. We demonstrate that such beams can be obtained by injecting a Gaussian beam in a small piece of silica graded-index multimode fiber. This minimalistic low-cost method is applied for improving the axial resolution of a two-photon microscope.

9 pages, 5 figures