Dan Oron Hot Topics presentation: Patterned Multiphoton Photoactivation in Scattering Tissue by Temporal Focusing

Laser illumination of tissue produces a broad area of response as light is scattered in front of and beyond the focus region. In his presentation, "Patterened multiphoton photoactivation in scattering tissue by temporal focusing," Dan Oron (Weizmann Institute of Science) describes how this can be overcome by using two-photon techniques where only the region of interest contains the two-photon response as the diffuse light is too weak in other regions.

Temporal focusing uses multiple pulses and changes the duration of the individual pulses so that their overlap at a specific location is limited in time. This combination of spatial and temporal focusing provides improved sensitivity which facilitates much longer depths of penetration in tissue. This technique was used to photoactively stimulate a single neuron through 200 microns of nerve tissue.

Dan Oron is Principle Investigator of the Nanophotonics Group at the  Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). His research interests include nonlinear optics, semiconductor quantum dots, localized surface plasmons, sub-diffraction limited, imaging, multiphoton microscopy, hydrodynamic instability.