Apodization in confocal scanning microscopy

摘要

Confocal scanning microscopy is an imaging technique meanly featured by its unique optical sectioning capacity when imaging three-dimensional objects. In this work we improve the axial resolution of these setups by introducing pupil filters with specified amplitude transmittance. Our filter-design procedure, which of course is valid for the nonparaxial regime, is applied to both conventional and 4Pi confocal microscopes.