Developments and design of optical systems for microscopes at Carl Zeiss

Abstract

Nowadays optical design for microscopes encloses besides the classical approach many new ideas like implementation of new optical elements, the consideration of physical effects or digital image processing. All these things play an important role during the development of microscopes and microscopic components at Carl Zeiss. In this paper we present examples of the classical approach starting with the imaging theory of Ernst Abbe as well as the non-classical approach ranging from microscopic objectives with diffractive optical elements over the implementation of the propagation theory of short-time laser pulses in optical design software to digital image restoration and phase measurement.