Importance

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Abstract

An improved real-time confocal scanning microscope, and an improved perforated disk for use in such microscope. A preferred embodiment of the inventive microscope includes a polarizing beamsplitting cube and a rotatable Nipkow disk perforted with a hexagonal hole pattern. The disk is preferably mounted so that the scan lines produced as the disk rotates will cross both the sample feature to be imaged and the sensor array in the system's video camera at an angle substantially equal to 45 degrees. This disk orientation ensures that brightness variations caused by a non-uniform scan will not affect the measurements. Rotation of the disk is preferably synchronized with the camera frame rate to prevent any scan errors from causing random (frame to frame) variations in the camera output. The polarizing beamsplitting cube consists of two triangular prisms connected (i.e., cemented) together by a dielectric film. Undesirable light reflections from the cube's faces are eliminated by orienting the cube about the dielectric film's normal axis so that light is incident at the cube at acute angles with respect to the cube's faces. An absorbing filter (such as a piece of black glass) is preferably optically cemented (or painted or otherwise coated) on the back face of the cube to absorb stray light.

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First Claim