Saturated confocal fluorescence microscopy with linear polarization modulation

In confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy, the effective modulation transfer function with Gaussian plane wave illumination covers very few high-frequency components, which prohibits further improvement of the spatial resolution. In this study, we propose saturated confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy with linear polarization to achieve super-resolution imaging. In saturated confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy with linear polarization, the effective modulation transfer function in the Fourier domain is extended in comparison with that of Gaussian plane wave illumination. The digital algorithm is adapted to retrieve the super-resolved image from the modulated recordings. The simulation results demonstrated that saturated confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy with linear polarization could be used to increase the resolution in confocal scanning fluorescence microscopy.