In this paper we analyze the capability of adaptive lenses to replace mechanical axial scanning in confocal microscopy. The adaptive approach promises to achieve high scan rates in a rather simple implementation. This may open up new applications in biomedical imaging or surface analysis in micro- and nanoelectronics, where currently the axial scan rates and the flexibility at the scan process are the limiting factors. The results show that fast and adaptive axial scanning is possible using electrically tunable lenses but the performance degrades during the scan. This is due to defocus and spherical aberrations introduced to the system by tuning of the adaptive lens. These detune the observation plane away from the best focus which strongly deteriorates the axial resolution by a factor of ~2.4. Introducing balancing aberrations allows addressing these influences. The presented approach is based on the employment of a second adaptive lens, located in the detection path. It enables shifting the observation plane back to the best focus position and thus creating axial scans with homogeneous axial resolution. We present simulated and experimental proof-of-principle results.

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Temporal pulse characterization methods can often not be applied to UV pulses due to the lack of suitable nonlinear crystals and very low pulse energies. Here, a method is introduced for the characterization of two unknown and independent laser pulses. The applicability is broad, but the method is especially useful for pulses in the deep UV, because pulse energies on the picojoule-scale suffice. The basis is a spectral analysis of the two interfering UV pulses, while one of the pulses is phase shifted by an unknown VIS-IR pulse via cross-phase modulation. The pulse retrieval is analytic and the fidelity can be checked by comparing the complex-valued data trace with the retrieved trace.

Optical transmission through fluctuating interfaces of mediums with different refractive indexes is limited by the occurring distortions. Temporal fluctuations of such distortions deteriorate optical measurements. In order to overcome this shortcoming we propose the use of adaptive optics. For the first time, an interferometric velocity measurement technique with embedded adaptive optics is presented for flow velocity measurements through a fluctuating air-water interface. A low order distortion correction technique using a fast deformable mirror and a Hartmann-Shack camera with high frame rate is employed. The obtained high control bandwidth enables precise measurements also at fast fluctuating media interfaces. This methodology paves the way for several kinds of optical flow measurements in various complex environments.

Noncollinear pulse characterization methods can be applied to over-octave spanning waveforms, but geometrical effects in the nonlinear medium such as beam smearing and critical sensitivity to beam alignment hinder their accurate application. Here, a method is introduced for the temporal and spatial characterization of two pulses by interferometric, spectrally resolved imaging of self-diffraction. Geometrical effects are resolved by the method and, therefore, do not limit the accuracy. Two methods for quantitative pulse retrieval are presented. One method is analytical and very fast; the other method is iterative and more robust if applied to noisy data.