The use of proposed phase masks is investigated in mathematical modelling and experiment for the use in a stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope applying wavefront shaping by a SLM. We demonstrate the applicability of these phase masks for modal wavefront sensing of low order aberration modes up to the third order of Zernike polynomials, utilizing the point detector of a confocal microscope in a ‘guide star’ approach.

STED microscopy is one of several types of super resolution microscopy techniques that have recently been developed to bypass the diffraction limit of light microscopy to increase resolution. STED is a deterministic functional technique that exploits the non-linear response of fluorophores commonly used to label biological samples in order to achieve an improvement in resolution, that is to say STED allows for images to be taken at resolutions below the diffraction limit.