We present the fabrication and optical characterization of nano-scale solid immersion lenses (nano-SILs) with sizes down to a subwavelength range. Submicron-scale cylinders fabricated by electron-beam lithography (EBL) are thermally reflowed to form a spherical shape. Subsequent soft lithography leads to nano-SILs on transparent substrates, i.e. glass, for optical characterization with visible ...

PURPOSE Megavoltage photon beams are typically used for therapy because of their skin-sparing effect. However, a focused low-energy x-ray beam would also be skin sparing, and would have a higher dose concentration at the focal spot. Such a beam can be produced with polycapillary optics. MCNP5 was used to model dose profiles for a scanned focused beam, using measured beam parameters. The potenti...

Wavefront sensing systems measure the slope or curvature of a surface by calculating the centroid displacement of two focal spot images. Accurately finding the centroid of each focal spot determines the measurement results. This paper studied several widely used centroid-finding techniques and observed that thresholding is the most critical factor affecting the centroid-finding accuracy. Since ...

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is a molecular diagnostic technique in which a fluorescent labeled probe hybridizes to a target nucleotide sequence of deoxyribose nucleic acid. Upon excitation, each chromosome containing the target sequence produces a fluorescent signal (spot). Because fluorescent spot counting is tedious and often subjective, automated digital algorithms to count spo...

The modulation transferfunction (MTP)has been used in the imagingfield to evaluatefidetity of imaging system< in reproducing different spatial frequencies. It has been usedfor similar purpose in radiographic imaging also. As the focal spot size has an infiuence on the resolution of a system it should be expacted to hiflueuce MTFtoo. Sucb qualitative linkage between focal spot size and MTFhas be...

We investigated X-ray energy distribution in an X-ray microbeam produced by a polycapillary X-ray lens in combination with a sealed-type X-ray tube. This polycapillary X-ray lens has an output focal distance (OFD) of approximately 15 mm. The size of the X-ray microbeam and its OFD were estimated by using a wire scanning method. In our case, the sizes of the X-ray microbeams at the output focal ...

We have numerically designed a compact structure to concentrate optical waves from a silicon-on-insulator waveguide to a deep sub-wavelength and high intensity surface plasmon focal spot at the tip of a metallic strip taper. A systematic design approach is developed to obtain an optimal photon-surface plasmon side coupling efficiency of up to 50% at 1.55 μm wavelength, and an over 50 times incr...

This paper demonstrates multiphoton excited fluorescence imaging through a polarisation maintaining multicore fiber (PM-MCF) while the fiber is dynamically deformed using all-proximal detection. Single-shot proximal measurement of the relative optical path lengths of all the cores of the PM-MCF in double pass is achieved using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer read out by a scientific CMOS camera o...