About AO microscopy

Adaptive optics (AO) is becoming an ever more commonplace technology for microscopy and many researchers are combining adaptive optics into their existing microscope systems. Despite these developments, the technology is still considered as challenging by many. While there is much information already in the public domain, it is mostly contained within academic papers, whose format is not ideal for conveying the information necessary for practical implementation. This site was set up in order to address these challenges and to help make AO more accessible to those who wish to use it, but not become full-time experts. We hope this will help address the many questions we receive on this topic and provide the community with the tools required to implement AO in their own systems.

The documents posted here will include tutorials, experimental protocols, and software. This will range from simple hints and tips through to extensive documentation of procedures. We intend to post material whenever it is ready, and documents will be updated with newer versions when we have them. We chose to set up the site in this way, to be free from the constraints of the traditional publishing process, which is ill-suited to the dissemination of this type of material, particularly when content could be frequently updated as our own approaches develop.

In some aspects, the material might include standard procedures that are commonly used by many researchers, but are still useful information for those at the early stages of AO adoption. While not all earlier related work may be cited in the documents, we do not try to claim such methods as our own. Rather we would just like to present such concepts in a manner that will be helpful to the broader community.

It is important that the material presented here is citable and that there is a permanent record. For that reason, we make use of the Zenodo platform to provide DOIs that can be cited when referencing this work. For each tutorial, you will find a 'concept' DOI that points to the latest version of the document, even if it's updated in the future, and a 'version' DOI that points to the specific current version of the document.

If you'd like to provide feedback on this site, or even provide contributions of your own, please get in contact using the contact form.

Martin Booth, Dynamic Optics and Photonics Group, University of Oxford