Fig. 3
The developed theory calculates the 3D SEE microscopy resolution. a A good agreement is observed between the simulated (left) and experimental (right) images at three different powers, corresponding to the axial diffraction limit, lateral diffraction limit and sub-diffraction uSEE microscopy. The dashed black box indicates the span of the experimentally measured area. The area outside of the black box contains a flat background equal to the average background in the measured area. This facilitates the visual comparison of the different panels. b The cross-sections of the respective profiles in (a) quantitatively confirm the agreement between simulation and experiment. Resolution vs excitation (c) and resolution vs emission (d) curves can be used as a guide to find the most appropriate imaging regime, depending on damage threshold, detection efficiency and desired resolution. Gray dashed lines mark the lateral and axial diffraction limits. The blue symbols represent experimental data (circles for lateral direction and triangles for axial direction). The red curves show the simulated results (full line for lateral direction and dashed line for axial direction)
