2025/11/19 by Liu, Meimei, Zhu, Yuqi, Gratta, Giorgio
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Electrowetting and Microfluidic Technologies #FOS: Physical sciences #Optical measurement and interference techniques #Optics (physics.optics)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.15405
openalex publication_date 2025/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Off-axis parabolic mirrors (OAPs) are occasionally desirable for specialized applications, but are known to introduce field-dependent astigmatic aberrations. In an experiment where optical tweezers are formed by OAPs, another OAP is added to form a relay configuration with an optional microscope, resulting in near diffraction-limited performance, with a resolution of 2.19 μm. The severe radially non-uniform distortion incurred by this configuration, with a long path length and a large field of view, requires software corrections for the microscopic image. To avoid overfitting given the limited features available for calibration at the tweezers focal plane, a distortion model with a reduced set of parameters is selected based on simulation data. Applying the model to experimental data, an average residual error of 3.60 μm (1.33 μm) is achieved in object space after the simple relay (adding a 5 × microscope) over a field of approximately 1 μm × 1 μm (200 μm × 200 μm). The residual errors are likely dominated by diffraction artifacts in the features used for correction.