Main Components and Functions of a Laser Confocal Microscope:
1. Illumination pinhole
Function: Make the laser pass through the illumination pinhole to form a point light source, which has unique advantages such as strong directionality, small divergence, high brightness, high spatial and temporal coherence, and planar polarization excitation. And it forms a confocal device with the detector pinhole and focal plane.
2. Beam splitter
Function: Separate sample excitation fluorescence from other non signal light.
3. Objective lens
4. Focal plane
Function: The laser point light source focuses on the object at the focal plane, exciting the fluorescently labeled sample to emit fluorescence and form a focal spot. The light spot is processed by a series of devices such as an objective lens and a beam splitter, and focused at two locations: the illumination pinhole and the detector pinhole. The meaning of confocal comes from this.
5. Detector pinhole
Function: Plays as a spatial filter. To maximize the obstruction of non focused plane scattered light and scattered light outside the non focal spot on the focused plane, in order to ensure that all fluorescence signals received by the detector pinhole come from the focal position of the sample spot. Therefore, the diffraction focused spot on the sample and the detector pinhole imaging spot contain the same information (two-point conjugate).
6. Photomultiplier tube (detector)
Function: Receive light signals through pinholes, convert them into electrical signals, and transmit them to the computer, resulting in a clear image of the entire focal plane on the screen.
7. Laser: The development of confocal microscopy technology cannot be separated from the rapid development of lasers. We can choose different lasers according to our research needs. as ArUV(351.364nm),HeCd(442nm),AR(457,488,514nm),ArKr(488,568,647nm)Kr(568nm),HeNe(543nm),HeNe(633nm) Wait.
8. Multiple fluorescence channels: Having multiple fluorescence channels to achieve multiple labeling of samples simultaneously.
