[WikiEN-l] Polarized light microscopy

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Carcharoth
> <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Anyone know why there isn't an article on Wikipedia on polarized light
>> microscopy?
>
> Are you talking about [[Differential interference contrast
> microscopy]] or [[Interference reflection microscopy]]? Both appear to
> require polarized light.

Yeah, but I think all three are different, not that I claim to know
the difference.

http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/dic/index.html
http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/confocal/reflectedconfocalintro.html
http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/polarized/polarizedintro.html

The reason I linked to the www.microscopyu.com article on confocal
microscopy was because they mention 'Interference reflection
microscopy'. To give a flavour of the different techniques and modes
and instruments (I always get terribly confused when trying to work
out what is meant by all these different terms), here are a few
quotes:

"Both the laser scanning confocal microscope (LSCM) and the Nipkow
spinning disk microscope can be utilized in confocal reflection mode."

"A traditional biological application of widefield reflected light
imaging is for observing the interactions between cells growing in
tissue culture on glass coverslips using a technique termed
interference reflection microscopy."

"Presented in Figure 2 are interference reflection digital images
captured with confocal reflection microscopy techniques."

"Recently, using a related technique, improved images of filopodia
were collected from PC12 cells (rat pheochromocytoma) by growing the
cells on a more reflecting substrate. The technique, termed
backscatter-enhanced reflection confocal microscopy, produces images
that resemble those collected using traditional differential
interference contrast (DIC) microscopy."

I gave up at that point... (actually, the site does explain things in
a rather accessible way, so let that put anyone off).

One of the applications of PLM is analysing rock samples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrographic_microscope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_mineralogy

Those articles contain PLM images and talk about the technique, so I
was right to think that there is something somewhere about this. Not
quite sure why the redirect AGK pointed out (which was moderately
valid) was deleted three years ago, but the editor is still here so it
is possible to ask. I guess one reason would be that there is more to
PLM that just the geological applications.

Carcharoth