Texas A&M University researchers demonstrate how a
narrow-band strobe light source for speckle-free imaging has the potential to
reveal microscopic forms of life
(May 4, 2015) In
modern microscope imaging techniques, lasers are used as light sources because
they can deliver fast pulsed and extremely high-intensity radiation to a
target, allowing for rapid image acquisition. However, traditional lasers come
with a significant disadvantage in that they produce images with blurred
speckle patterns — a visual artifact that arises because of a property of
traditional lasers called "high spatial coherence." These speckles
greatly reduce image quality in wide-field microscopy, a common technique for
making broad swath images of the whole side of a cell or some other part of the
microscopic world in order to understand its intricate inner workings.