Self-suppression of Bessel Beam Side Lobes for High-Contrast Light Sheet Microscopy

An ideal illumination for light sheet fluorescence microscopy entails both a localized and a propagation invariant optical field. Both Bessel beams and Airy beams satisfy these conditions, but their non-diffracting feature comes at the cost of the presence of high-energy side lobes that notably degrade the imaging contrast and induce photobleaching. This chapter discusses the results of the article Self-suppression of Bessel beam side lobes for high-contrast light sheet microscopy. We demonstrate the use of a light droplet illumination whose side lobes are self-suppressed by interfering Bessel beams of specific k-vectors. Our droplet illumination (see previous Chap. 4) readily achieves a \(50\%\) extinction of the out-of-focus light, providing a more efficient energy localization and an increased imaging contrast obtained in a standard light sheet microscope. This work is currently under revision in Optica (OSA).