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Numerical aperture is commonly used in microscopy to describe the acceptance cone of an objective (and hence its light-gathering ability and resolution), and in fiber optics, in which it describes the range of angles within which light that is incident on the fiber will be transmitted along it.
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 ...
The numerical aperture of a Gaussian beam is defined to be NA = n sin θ, where n is the index of refraction of the medium through which the beam propagates. This means that the Rayleigh range is related to the numerical aperture by z R = n w 0 N A . {\displaystyle z_{\mathrm {R} }={\frac {nw_{0}}{\mathrm {NA} }}.}
A point source as imaged by a system with negative (top), zero (center), and positive (bottom) spherical aberration. Images to the left are defocused toward the inside, images on the right toward the outside. The point spread function (PSF) describes the response of a focused optical imaging system to a point source or point object.
Scale bars: 1 μm. [ 2 ] Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) or scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) is a microscopy technique for nanostructure investigation that breaks the far field resolution limit by exploiting the properties of evanescent waves. In SNOM, the excitation laser light is focused through an aperture with a ...
f-number. Diagram of decreasing apertures, that is, increasing f-numbers, in one-stop increments; each aperture has half the light-gathering area of the previous one. An f-number is a measure of the light-gathering ability of an optical system such as a camera lens. It is calculated by dividing the system's focal length by the diameter of the ...
Aperture. In biology, the pupil (appearing as a black hole) of the eye is its aperture and the iris is its diaphragm. In humans, the pupil can constrict to as small as 2 mm (f/ 8.3) and dilate to larger than 8 mm (f/ 2.1) in some individuals. In optics, the aperture of an optical system (including a system consisted of a single lens) is a hole ...
The aperture and angle of the light cone must be adjusted (via the size of the diaphragm) for each different objective lens with different numerical apertures. Condensers typically consist of a variable-aperture diaphragm and one or more lenses. Light from the illumination source of the microscope passes through the diaphragm and is focused by ...