Excitation and emission dual-wavelength confocal metalens designed directly in the biological tissue environment for two-photon micro-endoscopy.

ABSTRACT

With the advantages of completely controlling the phase, amplitude, and polarization in subwavelength range, metalenses have drawn intensive attentions in high resolution two-photon micro-endoscopic fluorescence imaging system. However, chromatic dispersion and severe scattering of biological tissue significantly reduce excitation-collection efficiency in the traditional two-photon imaging system based on traditional metalenses designed in the air background. Here, an excitation and emission dual-wavelength confocal and polarization-insensitive metalens designed in the biological tissue environment was proposed by adopting the composite embedding structure and spatial multiplexing approach. The metalens with numerical aperture (NA) of 0.895 can focus the excitation (915 nm) and emission (510 nm) beams to the same focal spot in the mouse cortex. According to the theoretical simulation of two-photon fluorescence imaging, the lateral resolution of the collected fluorescent spots via the proposed metalens can be up to 0.42 µm. Compared to the metalens designed in the air environment, the collection efficiency of fluorescent spot is improved from 5.92% to 14.60%. Our investigation has opened a new window of high resolution and minimally invasive imaging in deep regions of biological tissues.