Tailoring speckle statistics for bioimaging application (Conference Presentation)

We developed a simple, robust method of customizing the intensity statistics of laser speckles and introducing nonlocal correlations among the speckle grains. The tailored speckle patterns exhibit radically different topologies and varying degrees of spatial order. Our ability of controlling the speckle statistics enabled the customization of speckled illumination patterns for bioimaging applications. One example is parallelized super-resolution microscopy. We design and create special speckle patterns for parallelized nonlinear pattern-illumination microscopy based on fluorescence photoswitching. The spatial resolution is three times higher than the diffraction limit of illumination optics. We further show that tailored speckles vastly outperform standard speckles.