| Traditionally, adaptive optics (AO) systems for microscopy have focused on AO at the pupil plane, however this produces poor performance in samples with both spatially-variant aberrations, such as non-flat sample interfaces, and spatially-invariant aberrations, such as spherical aberration due to a difference between the sample index of refraction and the sample for which the objective was designed. Here, we demonstrate well-corrected, wide field-of-view (FOV) microscopy by simultaneously correcting the two types of aberrations using two AO loops. Such an approach is necessary in wide-field applications where both types of aberration may be present, as each AO loop can only fully correct one type of aberration. Wide FOV corrections are demonstrated in a trans-illumination microscope equipped with two deformable mirrors (DMs), using a partitioned aperture wavefront (PAW) sensor to directly control the DM conjugated to the sample interface and a sensor-less genetic algorithm to control the DM conjugated to the objective's pupil. |
