Influence of the pinhole size on the resolution of the 4Pi' microscope studied by means of the optical transfer function

Abstract

Optical transfer functions are presented for the 4pi' microscope. The effects of the size of the confocal pinhole on the three-dimensional resolution are studied. It is shown that the resolution of the 4Pi' microscope depends weakly on the pinhole size. This result suggest that the pinhole can be removed in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio