Planar light-sheets from curved laser beams for two-photon microscopy

Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy allows minimally invasive 3D imaging of biological samples. Unlike other microscopes, a light-sheet illuminates the focal plane from the side. To uniformly illuminate a wide field-of-view, propagation-invariant light-fields have been proposed. While the propagation-invariant Airy beam is particularly advantageous for single-photon excitation, its multi-photon performance is limited by its intricate transversal structure and curvature. Here we demonstrate the first planar Airy beam light-sheet. Its uniform and symmetric illumination enables rapid two-photon excitation across a wide field-of-view. Moreover, it eliminates the need for deconvolution and it can significantly simplify a dual-use, single and two-photon, imaging instrument.