Realization of noncontact confocal optical microsphere imaging microscope.

A novel noncontact confocal optical microsphere imaging microscope (COMIM) is proposed to achieve high contrast optical nano-imaging at a high scanning speed. The developed setup obtains images with significantly higher contrast when compared with conventional bright-field microsphere nano-imaging, as well as with a commercial confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM). With the image-by-image scanning scheme, COMIM takes only 11% time to complete a three-dimensional (3D) scanning image than using a commercial CLSM, while still offers an outstanding resolving power for the nano-features on the sample.