Is a "Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope" the same as a SEM electron microscope? Or are these two different things?
Cause I just found someone talking about having 10nm Z-Axis and 120nm XY-Axis resolution using a Olympus LEXT OLS 4100.
And from what I read earlier this should be below what is physically possible with "white light".
That would be perfect for reading a shattered blue-ray...
Edit: No, they just use violet light. That explains it...
Confocal florescence microscopy beats the diffraction limit by scanning a point of illumination over the entire sample like the electron beam in a cathode ray tube tv. A pinhole by the detector and aligned with the illumination point blocks out of focus light so that it collects only the light that came from the illumination point. The increased resolution comes from the fact that the pinhole blocks even the light too far from the center of the diffraction pattern so the collected light comes from a smaller area on the sample. That very small area scans over the sample and generally takes a long time to finish. This super resolution technique beats the diffraction limit for any color light
Oh, that sounds interesting. But I know way too little about "light" to be able to replicate that with "garage parts" on a budget.* :(
At best I can hope to get a used CLSM for somewhere around 10k, which is still way too expensive...
*or to even know if that is even possible in the end...
A widefield fluorescence microscope is much cheaper and single molecule resolution is possible if the fluorescent molecules are photoactivatable and sparsely activated. The center of the point spread function of received light can be located more precisely than the diffraction limit allows. Nonlinear least squares minimization of the difference between the image and the known shape of the point spread function learns the position of the center from the data. <10 nm resolution is possible with green light emitted from the fluorescent molecule.
Klaus Frank
David