Conventional microscopes provide essential information about samples in two dimensions — the plane of the microscope slide. But flat is not all that. In many instances, information about the object in the third dimension — the axis perpendicular to the microscope slide — is just as important to measure.
Now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have found a way to convert a problem affecting nearly all optical microscopes — lens aberrations, which cause imperfect focusing of light — into a solution that enables conventional microscopes to accurately measure the positions of points of light on a sample in all three dimensions.
