--- title: Cross-Sectioning Crickets With A Femtosecond Laser description: Ben Krasnow demonstrates using a femtosecond laser inside a scanning electron microscope to cut cross-sections of crickets for imaging. Unlike conventional... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/cross-sectioning-crickets-with-a-femtosecond-laser-yduowjulm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Cross-Sectioning Crickets With A Femtosecond Laser | daily.dev og:description: Ben Krasnow demonstrates using a femtosecond laser inside a scanning electron microscope to cut cross-sections of crickets for imaging. Unlike conventional... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/cross-sectioning-crickets-with-a-femtosecond-laser-yduowjulm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ydUOwjUlm.png og:image:alt: Cross-Sectioning Crickets With A Femtosecond Laser og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Cross-Sectioning Crickets With A Femtosecond Laser **[Hackaday](https://daily.dev/sources/hackaday)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Ben Krasnow demonstrates using a femtosecond laser inside a scanning electron microscope to cut cross-sections of crickets for imaging. Unlike conventional lasers, femtosecond lasers ablate material without heating surroundings, preserving sample integrity. The crickets were prepared through glutaraldehyde fixation, solvent exchange to remove water, and charring under argon to make them conductive. The laser and scanning galvo are mounted outside the microscope and shine through a window, with a servo-controlled aluminum shutter protecting the detector during ablation. A puzzling noise issue was traced to the painted shutter accumulating charged carbon particles, forming a capacitor that disrupted electron optics. After resolving this and other issues, time-lapse videos were captured showing the laser removing 30-micron layers to reveal the insects' internal structure. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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