Bessel Beams (BB) and BB lattices (BBL) represent a key enabling technology in photonics, microscopy, material processing, lithography and nanofabrication, as they enable generation of extended focal depth, self-healing and less prone to diffraction beams compared traditional approaches such as Gaussian beams.
Currently, such features are achieved by bulky and complex, tailor-made for-the-intended-application optical systems that lack flexibility, have limited resolution and diffraction efficiency, and are challenging to design and manufacture, not to mention costly.
To tackle such challenges, we are proposing a novel method to encode in a single flat element all the optical operations required to generate a 1D/2D/3D BBL, including those of the excitation objective.
We have fabricated such optical element using Meta-Surface (MS) technology and, for a proof-of concept, tested it in Light sheet microscopy to record neuronal activity in vivo in the zebrafish larval brain.