The White Confocal: Microscopic Optical Sectioning in all Colors

The White Confocal

0          Preface          

1          Microscopy - an introduction       

1.1       Lenses

1.2       The microscope

1.2.1   The objective lens

1.2.3   The compound microscope

1.3       Resolution and the limits

1.3.1   Abbes formula

1.3.2   Glowing spots

1.3.3   Full width half maximum

1.3.4   Which ist he truth?

1.4       Beyond the limit of resolution

2          Fluorescence

2.1       What is fluorescence

2.1.1   The fluorescence process

2.1.2   Color games

2.1.3   Life times

2.2       Microscopy by fluorescence

2.2.1   Power ratio of excitation and emission

2.2.2   Transmitted light and incident light

2.2.3   Illumination

2.2.4   Excitation filter

2.2.5   Incident light and beam splitter

2.3       Artificial colours

3          Confocal microscopy

3.1       The reason

3.2       The principle

3.2.1   Spot illumination

3.3       The scanned image

3.3.1   Recording

3.3.2   Scanning procedures

3.3.3   Slice thickness

3.3.4   The third dimension

3.4       Two photon microscopy

3.5       Elements of a confocal microscope

3.5.1   Light source

3.5.2   Excitation filter

3.5.3   Primary splitter

3.5.4   Beam scanner

3.5.5   Objective lens

3.5.7   Emission filter

3.5.8   Sensor

3.6       The "white" confocal microscope

4          Light sources

4.1       Laser

4.2       Laser types

4.3       White light laser

5          Acousto optical excitation filter

5.1       How works an acoustooptical tunable filter?

5.2       Multichannel dimmer for laser light

5.3       Spectral freedom: AOTF and white light laser

6          White beam splitting

6.1       Acoustooptical beam splitter

6.2       AOBS and white source

7          Split of the emissions

7.1       Prism

7.2       Grating

7.3       Continuous separation: the spectrum

8          Emission filtering

8.1       The line array detector

8.2       The multiband detector

9          Separation in time domain

9.1       Sensors sense photons

9.1.1   Photoelectron multiplier tube

9.1.2   Avalanche photodiode

9.1.3   Hybrid detector

9.2       White fluorescence measurement: FLIM

9.3       A white filter with high selectivity

10        Further reading