Field of view advantage of conjugate adaptive optics in microscopy applications.

The imaging performance of an optical microscope can be degraded by sample-induced aberrations. A general strategy to undo the effect of these aberrations is to apply wavefront correction with a deformable mirror (DM). In most cases the DM is placed conjugate to the microscope pupil, called pupil adaptive optics (AO). When the aberrations are spatially variant an alternative configuration involves placing the DM conjugate to the main source of aberrations, called conjugate AO. We provide a theoretical and experimental comparison of both configurations for the simplified case where spatially variant aberrations are produced by a well-defined phase screen. We pay particular attention to the resulting correction field of view (FOV). Conjugate AO is found to provide a significant FOV advantage. While this result is well known in the astronomical community, our goal here is to recast it specifically for the optical microscopy community.