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(2)/
(3) Tensors in Submicron-Scaled Bio-Tissues by Polarization Harmonics Optical Microscopy


* Department of Electrical Engineering and Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China; and
Molecular and Cell Biology Division, Development Center for Biotechnology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Chi-Kuang Sun, Tel.: 886-2-3366-5085; Fax: 866-2-2367-7467; E-mail: sun{at}cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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Since SHG does not occur in optically centrosymmetric media, SHG microscopy was first demonstrated for the studies of SHG photonic crystals (Gannaway and Sheppard, 1978
), surfaces/interfaces (Shen, 1989
), and field distribution in semiconductors (Sun et al., 2000
, 2001
), and was then applied to biological study including membrane potentials (Peleg et al., 1999
; Moreaux et al., 2000
), tissue polarity (Freund et al., 1986
; Guo, et al., 1997
), cellular structure (Campagnola et al., 2002
), and biocrystalline structures (Chu et al., 2002
). On the other hand, due to the optical dispersion property in biological tissues, THG was proven to be generated from regions with optical inhomogeneity and was applied to image general cellular and subcellular structures (Barad et al., 1997
; Müller et al., 1998
; Chu et al., 2001
; Sun et al., 2003a
,b
). We have previously demonstrated the simultaneous acquisition of SHG and THG imaging modalities in plant and animal tissues for morphological and functional studies (Chu et al., 2002
; Sun et al., 2003a
,b
).
The contrast in harmonics optical microscopy (HOM), especially SHG, reflects local arrangements and the crystallization degrees of underlying biomolecules and can thus be used to study the structural symmetry of the molecule arrangements and local intra- and intercellular matrices of tissues. It has been shown that with appropriate input laser polarization control and output SHG polarization detection, the absolute molecular orientations (Shen, 1989
) and crystallization degree (Campagnola et al., 2002
) can be obtained from the second-order nonlinear susceptibility. THG has also been found to exhibit strong polarization dependence on the orientation of nanoscopic aggregation domains in conjugated polymer films (Schaller et al., 2002
). However, there are very few articles addressing issues on the analysis of tensor elements of the nonlinear HG susceptibilities in submicron-scaled biocrystalline structures, which is of fundamental importance. In this article, we use the P-HOM technique to study and analyze the contributing tensor elements of the nonlinear optical susceptibilities, including both second- and third-harmonic generations. We demonstrated, for the first time, the explicit determination of all nonvanishing tensor elements of the second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility
(2) for SHG in submicron-scaled myofilaments inside mouse skeletal muscle tissues by analyzing the polarization relation between the incident fundamental and emitted SHG signals. The same technique was then utilized to investigate the third-order susceptibility
(3) for THG in the same mouse skeletal muscle tissues. Although there are ambiguities in the determination of
(3) nonlinear optical coefficients, specific relations can still be obtained based on the simple experimental observations.
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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12001350-nm infrared light. A homebuilt Cr:Forsterite laser, which operates at 1230 nm with a repetition rate of 110 MHz and a pulse width of 100 fs (350-mW average output), was used as the light source (Liu et al., 2001| THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HARMONIC GENERATIONS IN MUSCLE |
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2-µm period) unit of the myofibril is the sarcomere, which is the segment of the myofibril between two Z-lines, containing one section of A-band and one section of I-band. Inside a myofibril, the orderly arranged myofilaments provide the necessary nanocrystalline effect that determines the polarization dependency of the measured harmonic generations. We assign the parallel long axes of myosin/actin filaments as z axis (Fig. 1), which is the same as the long axes of parallel-aligned muscle fibers and myofibrils. The spatial arrangement of the helical myosin/actin filaments constituting the myofibrils, inside a skeletal muscle fiber, has a hexagonal symmetry in the plane perpendicular to z axis (for the detailed description of muscle fiber structure, please refer to Ross et al., 1989
1-µm), it should be the spatial symmetry of the local arrangement of the underlying myosin and actin filaments (
820-nm-thick), which is hexagonal, that determines the susceptibility tensor of the studied harmonic generations. By taking a scanning image, we are measuring 512 x 512 spatial points. Since our analysis is based on the scanned images, the nonlinear susceptibility we measured here is therefore the ensemble average of local arrangements of the myosin and actin filaments inside different spatial points with a submicron size. With parallel-aligned myosin and actin filaments, and loosely arranged nanohexagonal cells without orientation uniformity in the plane perpendicular to the z axis, the spatial symmetry of the ensemble-averaged myofilaments examined in an optical scale becomes cylindrical rather than hexagonal.
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in a hexagonal symmetry medium are d31, d33, d15, and d14 (Butcher and Cotter, 1990
![]() | (1) |
represents the unit vector along the symmetry z-axis,
is the incident electric field with fundamental light frequency, and
is the polarization unit vector. In our SHG measurement, the incident fundamental field is linearly polarized. The letters a, b, and c are parameters related to effective second-order SHG coefficient tensors. Their relations to the dij coefficients are d31 = b, d15 = c/2, and d33 = (a + b + c) (Stoller et al., 2002
and
would be symmetric in this case.
Due to the symmetry in the plane perpendicular to the z axis, in our experiment, we choose the optical propagation direction
perpendicular to the myosin/actin filament axis
(and incident field polarization
). In this case, we can control the incident field polarization E in both ordinary and extraordinary axes, which are perpendicular or parallel to the filament axis
respectively. We also decompose the induced second-order polarization into components parallel and perpendicular to the filament axis as
![]() | (2) |
![]() | (3) |
is the angle between
and
From the above expression, the
coefficient only contributes to the perpendicular component
with an angular dependence of sin2
. On the other hand, both d31 and d33 contribute to the parallel component
. Their angular dependence can be understood as follows. The magnitudes of the input field projected onto the directions parallel and perpendicular to the filament axis are proportional to cos
and sin
, respectively. The parallel component will contribute to second-order polarization via d33 coefficient, resulting in a second-order polarization also in the direction parallel to
As a result, the corresponding second-order polarization has a cos2
. dependency. Similar argument leads to the sin2
dependence for d31 coefficient. On the other hand, the second-order polarization
is contributed from the interaction between input field projections parallel and perpendicular to
through d15 and thus has a sin
cos
dependency. Given the nonlinear polarization, the second-harmonic intensity ISHG is proportional to
and from Eqs. 2 and 3, we have
![]() | (4) |
The polarization of the second-harmonic field, which is a combination of second-harmonic electric fields
and
induced by
and
, respectively, has an inclination angle
relative to the filament axis. This angle can be obtained from the angle of
relative to
as
![]() | (5) |
A schematic plot explaining the parameter assignment is given in Fig. 1.
Third-harmonic generation
The third-order susceptibilities for a hexagonal molecule has 41 nonzero elements and 19 independent elements (Butcher and Cotter, 1990
; Boyd, 1992
). If we further simplify the independent elements by assuming cylindrical symmetry, the third-order polarization can be expressed as
![]() | (6) |
There are only four independent effective third-order coefficients d(3). These four coefficients are related to the elements of third-order susceptibility tensor
(3) as
![]() | (7a) |
![]() | (7b) |
![]() | (7c) |
![]() | (7d) |
![]() | (8) |
![]() | (9) |
The third-harmonic intensity and polarization angle can be obtained using a method similar to that described above, giving
![]() | (10) |
![]() | (11) |
| EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION |
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between myosin/actin filaments orientation
and the incident fundamental polarization
No polarizer was placed between the detection PMTs and the sample. The rotation axis was adjusted to the center of the image so that the same sectioning region in a muscle fiber can be monitored. The arrow in Fig. 2 A indicates the fundamental polarization direction
. The strong SHG emission from a submicron-sized volume inside a muscle fiber can be attributed to the semicrystallized organization of myosin and actin filaments inside a myofibril (Chu et al., 2002
2-µm period can be observed where bright SHG stripes come from the A-bands due to the densely packed myosin/actin filaments inside (Campagnola et al., 2002
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between the fibril axis
and input field polarization
The physical origin of the relatively complex polarization dependency is the nature of the "non-centrosymmetric" cylindrical symmetry (cylindrical symmetry without a
h mirror reflection plane) in muscle fibers. The nonlinear optical response of materials with such symmetry is certainly highly dependent on the relative magnitude of the individual nonlinear matrix element, as we shall discuss below. No polarizer was inserted in the emission path during the measurements of Fig. 4. After inserting the polarizer, the polarization orientation of the emitted HG signals can be determined and the results are given in Fig. 5 as a function of the angle
. The data points in Fig. 5 A and 5 B are independently deduced from Fig. 3, AC, and Fig. 3, DF. For SHG calculation, Eq. 4 and 5 are applied respectively to compute the intensity (solid line in Fig. 4 A) and polarization orientation (solid line in Fig. 5 A) dependency on
, the angle of fundamental polarization relative to the myosin/actin filaments. Under the parameter assignment as
and d15/d31 = 1.15, the calculated fitting curve agrees well with the experimental data, and the root mean-square (RMS) of the fitting errors are 0.428 and 0.48 for SHG intensity and polarization orientation, respectively. Under the condition that the RMS of fitting error be <0.43 and 0.48 for SHG intensity and polarization separately, the solution range for d15/d31 is limited to 1.15 ± 0.01 and is 0.09 ± 0.03 for d33/d31 (see black area in Fig. 6 A). If the limitation of intensity fitting error is relaxed to be <0.5, the solution set for the second-order nonlinear susceptibility matrix elements will expand to the light shaded area in Fig. 6 A. Therefore, the second-order nonlinear susceptibility tensor for SHG from the myosin/actin filament ensemble inside a myofibril can be written down as
![]() | (12) |
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result implies that it is difficult to produce an axial second-order polarization with an optical field parallel to the myosin/actin filaments and that the radiated SHG are contributed mainly from d31 = dzxx and d15 = dxzx. Note that the nonzero d31 and d15 suggest the chirality in myosin and actin filaments inside a myofibril. Since chirality implies asymmetry between
and
if the filaments are not asymmetric, its optical properties should be invariant under
transformation. However, from Eq. 1, the second-order nonlinear polarization P(2) changes sign under such a transformation unless all coefficients a = b = c = 0. Therefore, the nonzero coefficients (thus nonzero d31 and d15) imply a favored direction for
of the filaments due to chirality. This suggestion complies with a previous conjecture, which states that the nonlinear optical properties in several biological materials (e.g., collagen matrix and muscle) are induced or enhanced by the chirality in their structure (Verbiest et al., 1998
430- and 550-nm, Marquez et al., 1998
direction, there should be no active components contributing to the SHG generation according to Eq. 9. We have also arranged our experiments according to this geometry and no significant SHG can be observed. The linearity of the SHG indicates that the depolarization effect of our high-NA objective is insignificant. Since
when the laser polarization is aligned with
(the molecular axis), the contribution of the depolarized light (with polarization component other than
) should be dominant, which is not the case in our experiment. This should be attributed to the fundamental Gaussian beam we utilized in our experiments and the high sectioning capability provided by the optical nonlinear processes where signals occurring around the focus dominate the observed image. The phase front and electric field distribution of a tightly focused Gaussian beam at focus is flat under paraxial approximation when using a relatively low-NA (<1.0) objective.
For THG fitting, the following relations have been used in Eq. 10 and 11:
and
whose resulted curve of the THG intensity and angular dependency on
fits well to experiments (Figs. 4 B and 5 B) with an RMS error of 0.426 for intensity and 0.316 for polarization orientation. Although the calculated results agree well with the experimental data, there is still a great degree of freedom in choosing the relative values of the third-order coefficients. Under the condition that the RMS of fitting error be <0.43 and 0.32 for THG intensity (Fig. 4 B) and polarization orientation (Fig. 5 B), respectively, only a small solution set for
and
is allowed and this solution set is plotted in Fig. 6 B (black area). If the constraint is loosened to allow the RMS of fitting error to be as large as 0.5 for THG intensity while keeping the polarization orientation constraint as 0.32, the permissible solution set will expand slightly, but all the possible solutions still fall within a three-dimensional area with a volume <2 (see the shaded area of Fig. 6 B). Although other measurements, such as oblique incidence on the muscle tissue, should be performed to fix the relations between these four effective parameters, we have successfully restricted all the possible combinations of these parameters (i.e., the contributing matrix elements) to a limited space depending on the acceptable fitting error.
In summary, we have demonstrated that, by studying the polarization relationship between the coherently generated harmonic signals and the fundamental excitations within the submicron-scaled foci by using the P-HOM, all nonvanishing elements of second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility
(2) in the submicron-scaled matrices formed by myosin and actin filaments inside myofibrils of skeletal muscle tissue can be explicitly determined. With the use of tightly focused P-HOM, we can avoid the phase-matching condition due to high-order micron-scaled structures in skeletal muscle fibers and obtain the submicron-scaled polarization dependency of second-harmonic generation intensity on the inclination angle between the filaments' long axes and the polarization direction of the linear polarized fundamental excitation laser light. From these dependencies, detailed information on the tensor elements of the second-order nonlinear susceptibilities can thus be analyzed and obtained. By acquiring a whole nonlinearly sectioned image with a submicron spatial resolution we also compare the polarization dependency and calculate the nonlinear susceptibilities over a large area of the tissue at the same time, which will not only provide the desired statistical average of the nonlinearity but will be especially useful with complex specimen geometry. The intrinsic optical sectioning and deep penetration capabilities of this technique also permit the determination of nonlinear susceptibility deep inside thick biological tissues. The same technique was also utilized to investigate the third-order susceptibility
(3) for THG. Although there are ambiguities in the determination of
(3) nonlinear optical coefficients, certain relations were found that explain well the experimental observations. The solution set for the contributing matrix elements
is restricted to a limited small space, which provides a useful guide for further determination of these elements.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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Submitted on September 16, 2003; accepted for publication January 29, 2004.
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