Phaseform showed PHI publicly for the first time at Focus on Microscopy 2025 in Taipei, 13 to 16 April. PHI is an adaptive optics platform that mounts on the camera port of a commercial microscope: a Deformable Phase Plate at the pupil plane for aberration correction, and an integrated tunable lens for motionless axial focusing, in one housing that clamps onto a standard C-mount. The microscope itself is not modified.
Why the camera port
Adaptive optics has been a rebuilding job. A deformable mirror is reflective, so the beam path has to fold around it; the relay optics that put it at a pupil plane take bench space and alignment time. That is the reason a technique which has been standard in astronomy for thirty years is still rare on a microscope in a working laboratory — not the physics, the installation.
A Deformable Phase Plate is transmissive. It sits in the beam path the way a filter does, which is what makes an attachment possible at all: PHI goes between the camera port and the sensor, and nothing upstream changes. Connect power and USB.
What is inside
PHI carries the DPP at the microscope's pupil plane, correcting up to the 7th radial order of Zernike modes — the aberrations that refractive-index mismatch, thick or scattering samples and the instrument itself introduce. Alongside it sits a tunable lens at the conjugate pupil plane with up to 16 diopters of focusing range, so the focal plane moves without moving the objective or the stage.
Correction runs without a wavefront sensor. Phinden, our sensorless correction software, estimates the aberration from the frames the microscope is already acquiring and applies the correction through the DPP while the run continues.
Modular, and reversible
The DPP is removable. Pull it and PHI drops into optical bypass with more than 90 % average transmission from 450 to 1050 nm, so routine imaging runs exactly as it did before — there is no reason to unmount the platform between experiments. The same housing takes current and future DPPs, so the aperture can be matched to the application without replacing the instrument.
Availability
PHI is available to order, with specifications and downloads on the PHI product page. If you want to know what it would do on your microscope, talk to us.
