The protochordate amphioxus has been a favorite object of study for over a century. Early workers gave particular attention to the notochord of this remarkable animal because of its unique position and structure and its evolutionary significance (1). Modern advances in microscopy have opened the way for new research on the chorda dorsalis. Tenbaum (2) recently examined it under the polarizing m...

Polarized light is the light in which all the rays vibrate in one plane. A polarizing microscope has two disk accessories. They are made up of polarizing plastic that allows light vibrating in one plane to pass. One of them is called a polarizer (placed below the condenser). Another similar disc is placed in the top part of the microscope and cuts off all the light vibrating in a perpendicular ...

Monte Carlo simulations of polarizing microscope textures for confined nematic droplets are presented. We consider uniaxial and biaxial cases with various boundary conditions and different values of the molecular biaxiality. The analysis of these optical textures should be of interest in assigning and characterizing biaxial nematic system, an issue of great current interest.

The dielectric properties of pure nematic liquid crystal (BKS/B07) and dye doped (Rhodamine B and Anthraquinone) nematic liquid crystal have been investigated in a wide frequency range of 1 kHz to 10 MHz through the dielectric spectroscopic method at varying temperature. In addition to this optical transmittance and textures of the samples have also been observed with a polarizing microscope.

The behaviour of planar samples of an antiferroelectric liquid crystal under DC electric field has been studied through observations with a polarizing microscope In the ferroelectric phase the dechiralization lines have not been observed under a vanishing electric field. They appeared with the increasing field. To explain that effect, we show by analysing the

We present a multi-color STED fluorescence microscope providing far-field optical resolution down to 20 nm for biomedical research. The optical design comprises fiber lasers, beam scanners, and a set of active and passive polarizing elements that cooperatively yield an optically robust system for routinely imaging samples at subdiffraction length scales.