UV diode laser excitation in flow cytometry

摘要

The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for exciting particles, and more specifically relates to analyzers or sorters for exciting fluorescently labeled particles with a multimode diode laser and the optics for making high resolution determinations from the multimode diode laser beam excitation.

主权项

1. An instrument comprising:
a flow source for delivering sperm along a flow axis to an interrogation zone; a laser that produces a multimode beam along a beam axis which illuminates sperm at the interrogation zone, wherein the multimode beam has a transverse beam profile with multiple spatially separated intensity peaks; beam shaping optics located on the beam axis which compress a beam height and a beam width of the transverse beam profile differently and focus the transverse beam profile to form a manipulated transverse beam profile with a pseudo-Gaussian intensity distribution at the interrogation zone, wherein the beam shaping optics highly compress the beam width, and wherein the manipulated transverse beam profile provides enough uniform laser exposure to sperm at the interrogation zone for sex sorting sperm; a detector for detecting reflected and/or fluoresced light from the illuminated sperm at the interrogation zone and for producing a signal representative of particle characteristics; and a processor in communication with the detector for analyzing the signal and determining particle characteristics.