Confocal laser scanning microscopy
Scanning optical microscopy

Unlike traditional microscopy, where the field is uniformly illuminated, in scanning optical microscopy it is continuously scanned by the image of a point of light provided by the objective itself, i.e. by a "spot" whose size is of the same order as the resolution limit. The luminous flux transmitted or reflected at each point of the object, i.e. at a given instant, is collected by a single photoreceptor, providing a signal with information on the photometric level at the point in question, whereas in traditional microscopy, each point of the field corresponds to a photosensitive element of the receptor (eye retina, photographic emulsion, television tube, CCD mosaic), each of which may have different sensitivity to the same excitation, or even different dimensions,...