In light microscopy the transverse nature of the electromagnetic
field precludes a strongly focused longitudinal field component,
thus confining polarization spectroscopy and imaging to two dimensions
(x,y). Here we describe a simple confocal microscopy arrangement
that optimizes for signal from molecules with transition dipoles
oriented parallel to the optic axis. In the proposed arrangement, we
not only generate a predominant longitudinally (z) polarized focal
field, but also engineer the detection scheme in such a way that in a
bulk of randomly oriented molecules, the microscope’s effective
point-spread function is dominated by the contribution of those molecules
that are oriented along the optic axis. Our arrangement not
only implicitly allows for the determination of the orientation of transition
dipoles of single molecules in three dimensions, but also highlights
the contribution of z-oriented molecules in three-dimensional
imaging.
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