Robust Bessel beam scanning without mechanical movement

Abstract

Bessel beams are sensitive to tilt limiting its use in confocal scanning microscopy. We discuss a method for scanning a Bessel beam using a spatial light modulator (SLM) without the need for mechanical movement. Adding a grating phase to the SLM input produces robust point spread functions across the imaging plane that deviate less than 1.5% away from unity in terms of its normalized fidelity.