High-speed laser-scanning biological microscopy using FACED.

Laser scanning is used in advanced biological microscopy to deliver superior imaging contrast, resolution and sensitivity. However, it is challenging to scale up the scanning speed required for interrogating a large and heterogeneous population of biological specimens or capturing highly dynamic biological processes at high spatiotemporal resolution. Bypassing the speed limitation of traditional mechanical methods, free-space angular-chirp-enhanced delay (FACED) is an all-optical, passive and reconfigurable laser-scanning approach that has been successfully applied in different microscopy modalities at an ultrafast line-scan rate of 1-80 MHz.