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Science Lab

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!
Images of the same area of a processed wafer taken with standard (left) and oblique (right) brightfield illumination using a Leica compound microscope. The defect on the wafer surface is clearly more visible with oblique illumination.

Rapid Semiconductor Inspection with Microscope Contrast Methods

Semiconductor inspection for QC of materials like wafers can be challenging. Microscope solutions that offer several contrast methods enable fast and reliable defect detection and efficient workflows.
Image of a Siemens star, where the diameter of the 1st black line circle is 10 mm and the 2nd is 20 mm, taken via an eyepiece of a M205 A stereo microscope. The rectangles represent the field of view (FOV) of a Leica digital camera when installed with various C-mounts (red 0.32x, blue 0.5x, green 0.63x).

Understanding Clearly the Magnification of Microscopy

To help users better understand the magnification of microscopy and how to determine the useful range of magnification values for digital microscopes, this article provides helpful guidelines.

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.
Intensity distribution (arbitrary color coding) of an image of two points where the distance between them corresponds to the Rayleigh criterion.

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.
Wafer

How to Boost your Microelectronic Component Inspection Performance

Do you need to see more when inspecting silicon wafers or MEMS? Would you like to get sharp and detailed sample images which are similar to those from electron microscopes? Watch this free webinar…
Mouse kidney section with Alexa Fluor™ 488 WGA, Alexa Fluor™ 568 Phalloidin, and DAPI. Sample is a FluoCells™ prepared slide #3 from Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA. Images courtesy of Dr. Reyna Martinez – De Luna, Upstate Medical University, Department of Ophthalmology.

The Power of Pairing Adaptive Deconvolution with Computational Clearing

Learn how deconvolution allows you to overcome losses in image resolution and contrast in widefield fluorescence microscopy due to the wave nature of light and the diffraction of light by optical…

Evaluating Axon Regeneration After Brain or Spine Trauma of Mice

Damaged nerve regeneration was investigated using mouse spinal cord sections treated with compounds that counter axon growth inhibitor (AGI) proteins. The sections were screened to find active and…
Spherical aberration describes the fact that waves which pass through the centre of the lens are refracted less than the waves which pass through the edges of the curved lens.

Eyepieces, Objectives and Optical Aberrations

For most microscope applications, there are generally only two sets of optics which are adjusted by the user, namely, the objectives and the eyepieces. Of course, this is assuming that the microscope…
Steps of Koehler Illumination

Koehler Illumination: A Brief History and a Practical Set Up in Five Easy Steps

The technique of Koehler Illumination is one of the most important and fundamental techniques in achieving optimum imaging in any given light microscope set-up. Although it should be routinely used as…
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