Adaptive acoustic imaging using aberration correction in difficult materials

This paper describes the key technological developments in the design of an adaptive optical scanning acoustic microscope. Adaption is a key technological advance because it enables the microscope to correct for the deleterious effects of the material microstructure, and gain robust instrument performance on a wide range of samples. The two important requirements for the instrument are a multi-channel acoustic wavefront detector to measure the aberration in the acoustic wavefront, and a highly adaptive acoustic source to correct for the effects of aberration. As well as describing the novel aspects of the instrument that allow it to adapt, we present experimental surface acoustic wave images acquired by the instrument that indicate the degree of performance improvement that can be achieved when adaption is used to correct for material aberration.