Gabriel Sirat

After his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gabriel Y Sirat was, a post-doc scholar at Caltech. There he discovered Conoscopic Holography, in a collaboration with Demitri Psaltis. His research work was focusing on this technique between 1986 and 2004, first as a researcher and a Professor at the Telecom School of Engineering in Paris, (1986-1989). Conoscopic Holography is currently positioned as a leading technology in high performance 3D optical acquisition; it is commonly used, for instance dentistry.

Shortly after Michael Berry’s ground breaking publication on conical diffraction, Gabriel Y Sirat was able to demonstrate that the specificities of this phenomenon may lead to new optical devices. One of them, a dynamic beam shaper, has major applications especially for super resolution imaging in fluorescence microscopy. In 2010, he cofounded BioAxial, a start-up company aimed at using conical diffraction to create a new family of super resolution modules.

COnical DIffraction Microscopy (CODIM) is a point scanning linear super resolution technique, with very low phototoxicity. It is available as an add-on to confocal microscopes. Its beam shaper creates a sequence of structured compact shapes, uses the point scanning module of the confocal microscope to scan the distributions and detect the emerging light using a low noise camera. By using dedicated algorithms, developed at BioAxial, it creates a super-resolved image with a two-fold resolution improvement.

CODIM emerges as a new super resolution modality, simple to use by a biologist as it does not require special sample preparation, both fixed and live, hence compatible with standard microscopy workflow.