Tailored light sheets through opaque cylindrical lenses

Strong scattering in the optical paths can be proactively exploited for determining light propagation and focusing through turbid media and ultimately improve optical imaging and light manipulation capabilities. The use of light shapers together with strongly scattering structures enables the production of foci confined in the nanoscale or on the other hand may provide significantly enhanced fields of view. Exploiting this concept,we introduce ad hoc engineered scattering structures,by direct femtosecond laser writing in the bulk of glasses,presenting isotropy in one dimension,and together with precisely phase-shaped illuminating light we produce submicrometer thin light sheets at user-defined positions. Our approach permits us to focus light of different wavelengths onto the same defined position without moving any optical element and correcting for chromatic aberrations. Furthermore,we demonstrate that natural biological tissues presenting isotropy in one dimension can also be used for generating light sheets directly in the biological sample.