Optical Microscope

The Scanning Optical Microscope

Instead of forming an entire image at one instant, a scanning optical microscope (SOM) scans a beam of light across specimen in a regular pattern, or raster, and forms its image point by point. A point of light is focused to a diffraction-limited spot on the sample by the objective lens. An image is built up point by point by a detector, either below the slide (if the microscope is exclusively ...

The Optical Microscope (draft)

Introduction The optical components of a microscope are its two imaging lenses (eyepiece and objective) and a condenser lens. The eyepiece and objective are responsible for magnifying the image of the specimen and projecting it onto the viewer’s retina or onto the film plane in a camera. The job of the condenser lens is to focus a cone of incident light onto the specimen. To provide the inciden...

Apertureless near-field optical microscope

We demonstrate a new method whereby near-field optical microscope resolution can be extended to the nanometer regime. The technique is based on measuring the modulation of the scattered electric field from the end of a sharp silicon tip as it is stabilized and scanned in close proximity to a sample surface. Our initial results demonstrate resolution in the 3 nm range--comparable to what can be ...

A scanning slit optical microscope.

All-Optical Scanning Acoustic Microscope

In this thesis a new instrument, the all-optical scanning acoustic microscope (O-SAM) is presented, it is a non contact scanning acoustic microscope (SAM) which uses lasers to both generate and detect surface acoustics waves (SAWs) The non contact nature of the O-SAM overcomes some difficulties associated with conventional SAMs because of the couplant and surface contact involved. This O-SAM al...