Investigation of the impulse response of an image inversion interferometer

Based on the proposal of Wicker and Heintzmann “Interferometric resolution improvement for confocal microscopes” [1] we demonstrate in principle the functionality of an image inversion interferometer (III) experimentally, which can be described by an appropriate frequency transfer function. Thereby, the FWHM of the impulse response narrows around 30% compared to the PSF of a classical system. The experimental data yield a FWHM of the impulse response of 0.83 μm as compared to the theoretical value of 1.21 μm at λ0=589nm by a wide field detection (NA=0.25) without an interferometer.