This paper describes a new angular displacement interferometer based on the internal-reflection effect. In order to make use of the internal-reflection effect, a novel prism assembly is designed, which yields a very compact optical configuration. As a result, the linearity of the angular displacement interferometer is greatly improved. Both the linearization of the measurement equation and the ...

Total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy has been widely used as a single molecule imaging technique to study various fundamental aspects of cell biology, owing to its ability to selectively excite a very thin fluorescent volume immediately above the substrate on which the cells are grown. However, TIRF microscopy has found little use in high content screening due to its complex...

The phenomenon of total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) was placed in the context of optical microscopy by Daniel Axelrod over three decades ago. TIRF microscopy exploits the properties of an evanescent electromagnetic field to optically section sample regions in the close vicinity of the substrate where the field is induced. The first applications in cell biology targeted investigation...

20 We demonstrate a simple method for combining instant structured illumination microscopy (SIM) 21 with total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRF), doubling the spatial resolution of TIRF 22 (down to 115 +/13 nm) and enabling imaging frame rates up to 100 Hz over hundreds of time points. 23 We apply instant TIRF-SIM to multiple live samples, achieving rapid, high contrast super-r...

In undergraduate optics laboratory, one thing that is not easily achieved is quantitative measurement of optical phase. The reason is that optical phase measurement usually requires expensive interferometers. We demonstrate measurement of relative optical phase shift upon total internal reflection. Total internal reflection, though known by every student of optics, is remembered by 100% reflect...

Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy has been applied to image the final stage of constitutive exocytosis, which is the fusion of single postGolgi carriers with the plasma membrane. The use of a membrane protein tagged with green fluorescent protein allowed the kinetics of fusion to be followed with a time resolution of 30 frames/s. Quantitative analysis allowed carriers undergoing...

We describe a quantitative and inexpensive method of demonstrating frustrated total internal reflection based on the attenuation of a laser beam through a wedge-shaped air gap between two glass prisms. An advantage of this method is that the thickness of the air gap can be determined by observing interference effects with only a slight modification of the setup. The experiment avoids the need t...

Photonics plays an important role in modern technologies, e.g. in telecommunications and sensing systems. Waveguiding structures with microand nano-meter scale features are the basic building blocks of photonic circuits. Large varieties of structures have been used by scientists and engineers. These range from the conventional planar and channel waveguides, which work on the basis of the total-...

The main conditions and parameters for obtaining surface relief total internal reflection diffraction gratings in conical mounting are presented. Calculated and experimental investigations reveal that there are ranges of grating periods, incidence angles, diffraction angles and gratings depths for which such gratings could be obtained, both for TE and TM polarizations. With optimized grating pa...

Triplet, photo-oxidized and other photoinduced, long-lived states of fluorophores are sensitive to the local environment and thus attractive for microenvironmental imaging purposes. In this work, we introduce an approach where these states are monitored in a total internal reflection (TIR) fluorescence microscope, via the characteristic variations of the time-averaged fluorescence occurring in ...