Science Lab
Science Lab
The knowledge portal of Leica Microsystems offers scientific research and teaching material on the subjects of microscopy. The content is designed to support beginners, experienced practitioners and scientists alike in their everyday work and experiments. Explore interactive tutorials and application notes, discover the basics of microscopy as well as high-end technologies – become part of the Science Lab community and share your expertise!
What is Empty Magnification and How can Users Avoid it
The phenomenon of “empty magnification”, which can occur while using an optical, light, or digital microscope, and how it can be avoided is explained in this article. The performance of an optical…
Immersion Objectives
How an immersion objective, which has a liquid medium between it and the specimen being observed, helps increase the numerical aperture and microscope resolution is explained in this article.
Microscope Resolution: Concepts, Factors and Calculation
This article explains in simple terms microscope resolution concepts, like the Airy disc, Abbe diffraction limit, Rayleigh criterion, and full width half max (FWHM). It also discusses the history.
Koehler Illumination: A Brief History and a Practical Set Up in Five Easy Steps
In this article, we will look at the history of the technique of Koehler Illumination in addition to how to adjust the components in five easy steps.
Collecting Light: The Importance of Numerical Aperture in Microscopy
Numerical aperture (abbreviated as ‘NA’) is an important consideration when trying to distinguish detail in a specimen viewed down the microscope. NA is a number without units and is related to the…
Optimization of the Interplay of Optical Components for Aberration Free Microscopy
Optical microscopes are used to magnify objects which are otherwise invisible for the human eye. For this purpose high quality optics is necessary to achieve appropriate resolution. However, besides…
Optical Microscopes – Some Basics
The optical microscope has been a standard tool in life science as well as material science for more than one and a half centuries now. To use this tool economically and effectively, it helps a lot to…
Depth of Field in Microscopy
In microscopy, depth of field is often seen as an empirical parameter. In practice it is determined by the correlation between numerical aperture, resolution and magnification. For the best possible…
