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Abstract:
We investigate the effect of the phase difference of the interfering wavefronts on the image intensity in 4Pi-confocal microscopy and thereby introduce a method to diminish the problem of the unknown phase difference in this microscope. An efficient implementation of our method utilizes binary amplitude filters reshaping the point-spread-function such that a significant disparity arises between the maximum fluorescence intensity in the constructive and destructive interference case. In the presence of planar and point-like features in the sample this property enables the system to unambiguously determine the mode of interference. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved