Laser Confocal Microscope Main Components and Functions
1.Illuminating pinhole
Function: To form a point light source after the laser passes through the illumination pinhole, the point light source has the unique advantages of strong directionality of the light source, small dispersion, high brightness, high spatial and temporal coherence, and plane polarisation excitation. And with the detector pinhole and the focal plane to form a confocal device.
2.Beam Separator
Function: Separate the sample excitation fluorescence from other non-signal light.
3. Objective lens
4.Focal plane
Function: The laser point light source irradiates the object and focuses it at the focal plane, which excites the fluorescence of the fluorescently labelled sample to emit fluorescence and form a focal spot. The spot is then processed by a series of devices such as the objective lens, beam splitter, etc., and focused at the illumination pinhole and the detector pinhole respectively. This is where the term confocal comes from.
5. Detector pinhole
Function: To act as a spatial filter. Maximum impediment to the non-focusing plane scattered light and the focusing plane of the non-focal spot outside the scattered light to ensure that the fluorescence signal received by the detector pinhole all come from the sample spot focus position, so the sample on the diffraction aggregation spot and the detector pinhole imaging spot contains the same information (two-point conjugate).
6. Photomultiplier tube (detector)
Function: Accepts the light signal through the pinhole, converts it into an electrical signal and transmits it to the computer, where a clear image of the entire focal plane appears on the screen.
7. Laser: The development of confocal microscope technology can not be separated from the rapid development of lasers. We can choose different lasers according to the research needs. Such as ArUV (351.364nm), HeCd (442nm), AR (457,488,514nm), ArKr (488,568,647nm) Kr (568nm), HeNe (543nm), HeNe (633nm) and so on.
8.Multi-fluorescence channels: with multiple fluorescence channels to achieve multiple labelling of samples at the same time.,
