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The numerical aperture with respect to a point P depends on the half-angle, θ1, of the maximum cone of light that can enter or exit the lens and the ambient index of refraction. As a pencil of light goes through a flat plane of glass, its half-angle changes to θ2. Due to Snell's law, the numerical aperture remains the same: NA = n1 sin θ1 ...
The near-field optical (NFO) microscope involved a sub-wavelength aperture at the apex of a metal coated sharply pointed transparent tip, and a feedback mechanism to maintain a constant distance of a few nanometers between the sample and the probe. Lewis et al. were also aware of the potential of an NFO microscope at this time. [14]
An optical instrument is said to be diffraction-limited if it has reached this limit of resolution performance. Other factors may affect an optical system's performance, such as lens imperfections or aberrations, but these are caused by errors in the manufacture or calculation of a lens, whereas the diffraction limit is the maximum resolution ...
Optical microscope. The optical microscope, also referred to as a light microscope, is a type of microscope that commonly uses visible light and a system of lenses to generate magnified images of small objects. Optical microscopes are the oldest design of microscope and were possibly invented in their present compound form in the 17th century.
The line-spread function is directly proportional to the vertical integration of the point-spread image. The optical-transfer function (OTF) is defined as the Fourier transform of the point-spread function and is thus generally a two-dimensional complex function. Typically only a one-dimensional slice is shown (c), corresponding to the Fourier ...
The expanded beam of a laser is focused in only one direction by a cylindrical lens, or by a combination of a cylindrical lens and a microscope objective as the latter is available in better optical quality and with higher numerical aperture than the first. This way a thin sheet of light or lightsheet is created in the focal region that can be ...
Angular resolution. A series of images representing the magnification of M87* with an angular size of some microarcseconds, comparable to viewing a tennis ball on the Moon (magnification from top left corner counter−clockwise to the top right corner). Angular resolution describes the ability of any image-forming device such as an optical or ...
where is the wavelength of the fluorescent emission and NA is the numerical aperture of the microscope. The theoretical resolution limit at the shortest practical excitation wavelength is around 150 nm in the lateral dimension and approaching 400 nm in the axial dimension (if using an objective having a numerical aperture of 1.40 and the ...