RESOLUTION IN NONLINEAR LASER-SCANNING MICROSCOPY

The lateral and depth resolution of nonlinear microscopy was studied s ystematically. Nonlinear microscopy can be classified into several cat egories depending on the coherence properties of the process that gene rates the imaging signal from the illuminating light, on whether a sin gle- or a two-beam geometry is used, and whether the optical setup is Type I or Type IT, An evaluation of the imaging equations shows that ( i) lateral and depth resolution improve with increasing nonlinearity, (ii) the differences between coherent and incoherent imaging diminish, and (iii) nonlinear imaging allows depth discrimination in Type I mic roscopy.