Self-organizing “pencil beam” laser could help scientists design brain-targeted therapies

Amazing stuff!

"... researchers discovered a paradoxical phenomenon in optical physics that could enable a new bioimaging method that’s faster and higher-resolution than existing technology.

They discovered that, under the right conditions, a chaotic mess of laser light can spontaneously self-organize into a highly focused “pencil beam.”

Using this self-organized pencil beam, the researchers captured 3D images of the human blood-brain barrier 25 times faster than the gold-standard method, while maintaining comparable resolution.

By showing individual cells absorbing drugs in real-time, this technology could help scientists test whether new drugs for neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s or ALS reach their targets in the brain, with greater speed and resolution. ..."

From the abstract:

"The formation of organized optical states in multidimensional systems is crucial for understanding light–matter interaction and advancing light-shaping technologies.

Here we report the observation of a self-localized, ultrafast pencil beam near the critical power in a standard multimode fiber.

We demonstrate that self-focusing, traditionally considered detrimental, facilitates a nonlinear spatiotemporal localized state with a sidelobe-suppressed Bessel-like profile and markedly improved stability.

Generated simply by an on-axis Gaussian launch, this beam is readily integrated into standard multiphoton microscopes.

We applied this self-localized beam to two-photon imaging of mouse enteric nervous systems, where it outperformed conventional Bessel beams through reduced sidelobes and enhanced aberration resilience.

Lastly, we monitored transferrin uptake dynamics in a live human blood–brain barrier model using minute-resolved three-dimensional scans, revealing spatiotemporal heterogeneity across different cell types.

Our findings offer a robust approach for generating ultrafast pencil beams, enabling high-throughput three-dimensional biosystem imaging to elucidate biological transport pathways."

Self-organizing “pencil beam” laser could help scientists design brain-targeted therapies | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "MIT researchers leveraged a surprise discovery to devise a faster and more precise biomedical imaging technique."

Self-localized ultrafast pencil beam for volumetric multiphoton imaging (no public access)

Self-localized ultrafast pencil beam for volumetric multiphoton imaging (preprint, open access)

Credits: Laser widerspricht Lehrbuch? Wie sich Licht selbst fokussiert