Wavefront shaping for forward scattering

Abstract

Aberrations and scattering limit the ability of optical microscopy to penetrate deep tissues. Adaptive optics (AO) is a very effective technique to correct for smooth aberrations. Wavefront shaping (WFS) techniques, on the other hand, compensate both scattering and aberrations and have guaranteed convergence even for finding high-dimensional corrections. However, if it is known in advance that the required corrections should be smooth, WFS is suboptimal because it does not use this a priori information. Here, we combine the best of AO and WFS by introducing a WFS method that takes into account the smoothness of the required correction. Our method is numerically stable and robust against noise, and it can find the corrections for multiple targets simultaneously. We experimentally confirmed that this method outperforms existing WFS techniques, especially in forward scattering samples.