Resolution enhancement of low-NA objectives in confocal fluorescence microscopy by diffractive lens arrays

In traditional confocal microscopes, high resolution and large fields of view are difficult to achieve simultaneously by microscope objectives, which limit the space-bandwidth products of the systems. With the proposed diffractive lens arrays, an objective with a low numerical aperture can have much higher resolution while maintaining its large field of view. Application of the diffractive lens arrays in fluorescence microscopy is presented in this work. The resolution enhancement is demonstrated by experiments with the fluorescent beads.