Parallelized STED fluorescence nanoscopy

We introduce a parallelized STED microscope featuring m = 4 pairs of scanning excitation and STED beams, providing m-fold increased imaging speed of a given sample area, while maintaining basically all of the advantages of single beam scanning. Requiring only a single laser source and fiber input, the setup is inherently aligned both spatially and temporally. Given enough laser power, the design is readily scalable to higher degrees of parallelization m. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America