Light sheet microscopy for fast volumetric imaging of colloidal fluids under shear*

Light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is emerging as a popular volumetric imaging method to study living cells, tissues, and whole organisms. It minimizes potential photodamage to the sample by confining the excitation light to the focal plane. However, most implementations of LSFM require two objective lenses placed orthogonally to one another. Such a setup precludes the use of high numerical aperture lenses and of many common sample mounting methods, such as between a glass slide and coverslip. Here, we adopt a single objective LSFM design. A single objective is used to both illuminate and image our sample. Downstream remote focusing lenses allow us to image the plane coincident with the illumination plane. With this configuration we are able to use a high numerical aperture objective lens (NA > 1.0) and acquire volumetric imaging data at several Hz. We show that this configuration and other LSFM setups are well suited to imaging colloidal samples. Particularly, we show that LSFM can be used to image colloidal and other soft matter samples while those samples are mechanically perturbed.