Lenses numerical aperture

Fig. 5. Optical sectioning of rhodamine phalloidin-stained F-actin in a neutrophil migrating through a 5-pm pore of a polycarbonate membrane. The neutrophil migration is stimulated in response to 10 M Af-formytmethionyl-leucy 1-phenylalanine. (A), (B), and (C) correspond to O.S-pm optical sections indicated as sections A, B, and C, respectively, in Fig. 4. The bar represents 10 pm. The images were collected with a Nikon Microphot FX microscope (x60 Plan-apochromat lens, numerical aperture, 1.6) connected to a Bio-Rad MRC600 laser-scanning confocal system.

The first two numbers on the lens are always the magnification and the numerical aperture (NA) of the lens. Numerical aperture is defined as (n sina), where n is the refractive index of the medium in front of the objective and a is half the angular range of light that the lens can accept. The resolution of the tens, if it is perfect, is proportional to 1/(NA), and the depth of... 

The resolution of an acoustic lens is determined by diffraction limitations, and is 7 = 0.51 /N.A [95], where is the wavelength of sound in liquid, and N.A is the numerical aperture of the acoustic lens. For smaller (high-frequency) lenses, N.A can be about 1, and this would give a resolution of 0.5 Kyj. Thus a well designed lens can obtain a diameter of the focal spot approaching an acoustic wavelength (about 0.4 /Ltm at 2.0 GHz in water). In this case, the acoustic microscope can achieve a resolution comparable to that of the optical microscope. 

Laser trapping is a technique to manipulate small sized materials, which was developed by Ashkin in 1970 [20, 21]. In this experiment, a laser beam is tightly focused by an objective lens with high numerical aperture (NA), and a dielectric... 

Dark-field illumination is classified into three types. The first one is for a microscope equipped with low numerical aperture (NA) objective lenses (see Fig. 1). To cast a shadow at the objective lens, a ring-slit as shown in Fig. IB is inserted into the light path. The second is for highNA (>0.5) objective lenses. Special, ready-made dark-field condensers or lenses are used for dark-field illumination. The third is independent... 

One of the features of confocal microscopy is that it can produce optical slices of defined thickness through thick specimens. Using a lens of high numerical aperture, thickness of the confocal sections can reach a theoretical limit of about 0.5 pm. Therefore, by moving the specimen up and down, a three-dimensional (3-D) image can be recorded. 

Numerical aperture is thus a quantitative measure of the "acceptance" angle of a lens. Likewise the numerical aperture of the condenser lens in Figure 16 is defined as... 

A lens images the diffracted light onto a wafer with the amount of information collected from the mask by the lens being related to the numerical aperture of the lens with higher NA lenses having higher resolution capability. 

We first review the essentials of the phase distribution of the electric fields at the focus of a high numerical aperture lens in Section II. After discussing the phase properties of the emitted signal, in Section HI we zoom in on how the information carried by the emitted held can be detected with phase-sensitive detection methods. Interferometric CARS imaging is presented as a useful technique for background suppression and signal enhancement. In Section IV, the principles of spatial interferometry in coherent microscopy are laid out and applications are discussed. The influence of phase distortions in turbid samples on phase-sensitive nonlinear microscopy is considered in Section V. Finally, in Section VI, we conclude this chapter with a brief discussion on the utility of phase-sensitive approaches to coherent microscopy. 

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