Field confinement with aberration correction for solid immersion lens based fluorescence correlation spectroscopy

The solid immersion lens (SIL) as a tool for increasing the field confinement as well as providing optimal performance by aberration compensation in a confocal fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) system is illustrated here. Using Zernike polynomials we show that aberration compensation and the resultant pre-shaping of the incident wavefront enables near diffraction-limited performance. This is explained based on vectorial computations for high apertures in the Debye approximation. The obtained axial resolution parameters are compared with the obtained diffusion times in a SIL-FCS experiment for measurements in solutions done at the single molecule level.