One rarely finds practical guidelines for the implementation of complex optical setups. Here, we aim to provide technical details on the decision making of building and revising a custom sensor-based adaptive optics (AO) direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscope (dSTORM) to provide practical assistance in setting up or troubleshooting similar devices. The foundation of this report is an instrument constructed as part of a master's thesis in 2021, which was built for deep tissue imaging. The setup is presented in the following way: (1) An optical and mechanical overview of the system at the beginning of this internship is given. (2) The optical components are described in detail in the order at which the light passes through, highlighting their working principle and implementation in the system. The optical component include (2A) a focus on even sample illumination, (2B) restoring telecentricity when working with commercial microscope bodies, (2C) the AO elements, namely the deformable mirror (DM) and the wavefront sensor, and their integration, and (2D) the separation of wavefront and image capture using fluorescent beads and a dichroic mirror. After addressing the limitations of the existing setup, modification options are derived. The modifications include the implementation of adjustment only light paths to improve system stability and revise the degrees of freedom of the components and changes in lens choices to meet the specifications of the AO components. Last, the capabilities of the modified setup are presented and discussed: (1) First, we enable epifluorescence imaging of bead samples through 180 µm unstained murine hippocampal tissue with wavefront error correction of ~ 90 %. Point spread function, wavefront shape and Zernike decomposition of bead samples are presented. (2) Second, we move from epifluorescent to dSTORM imaging of tubulin stained primary mouse hippocampal cells, which are imaged through up to 180 µm of unstained murine hippocampal tissue. We show that full width at half maximum (FWHM) of prominent features can be reduced in size by nearly a magnitude from uncorrected epiflourescence images to dSTORM images corrected by the adaptive optics. We present dSTORM localization count and FWHM of prominent features as as a function of imaging depth.

Same- and opposite-sign charge asymmetries are measured in lepton+jets \({t\overline{t}}\) events in which a \(b\)-hadron decays semileptonically to a soft muon, using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb\(^{−1}\) from proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of \(\sqrt{s}\) = 8 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The charge asymmetries are based on the charge of the lepton from the top-quark decay and the charge of the soft muon from the semileptonic decay of a \(b\)-hadron and are measured in a fiducial region corresponding to the experimental acceptance. Four CP asymmetries (one mixing and three direct) are measured and are found to be compatible with zero and consistent with the Standard Model.

A measurement of the \({t\overline{t}}Z\) and \({t\overline{t}}W\) production cross sections in final states with either two same-charge muons, or three or four leptons (electrons or muons) is presented. The analysis uses a data sample of proton–proton collisions at \(\sqrt{s}\) = 13 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 3.2 fb\(^{−1}\). The inclusive cross sections are extracted using likelihood fits to signal and control regions, resulting in \(\sigma_{{t\overline{t}}Z}\) = 0.9 ± 0.3 pb and \(\sigma_{{t\overline{t}}W}\) = 1.5 ± 0.8 pb, in agreement with the Standard Model predictions.

The production of a \(Z\) boson and a photon in association with a high-mass dijet system is studied using 20.2 fb\(^{−1}\) of proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of \(\sqrt{s}\) = 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. Final states with a photon and a Z boson decaying into a pair of either electrons, muons, or neutrinos are analysed. Electroweak and total \(pp\) → \(Zγjj\) cross-sections are extracted in two fiducial regions with different sensitivities to electroweak production processes. Quartic couplings of vector bosons are studied in regions of phase space with an enhanced contribution from pure electroweak production, sensitive to vector-boson scattering processes \(V V → Zγ\). No deviations from Standard Model predictions are observed and constraints are placed on anomalous couplings parameterized by higher-dimensional operators using effective field theory.

A measurement of the splitting scales occuring in the \(k_t\) jet-clustering algorithm is presented for final states containing a \(Z\) boson. The measurement is done using 20.2 fb\(^{−1}\) of proton-proton collision data collected at a centre-of-mass energy of \(\sqrt{s} = 8\) TeV by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2012. The measurement is based on charged-particle track information, which is measured with excellent precision in the \(p_T\) region relevant for the transition between the perturbative and the non-perturbative regimes. The data distributions are corrected for detector effects, and are found to deviate from state-of-the-art predictions in various regions of the observables.