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The Airyscan detector couples to LSM confocal microscopes to deliver significant improvements in sensitivity and signal to noise ratio as well as a 1.7x resolution increase in x,y and z.  

Airyscan White Paper

Basic Airyscan Principle

Airyscan Detector Details

Revolutionize Your Confocal Imaging with Airyscan

Your samples tend either to be very small, move very fast or bleach very quickly. Or do all of that at once. To get unbiased data from live cells or other weakly labelled samples, there's no such thing as too much sensitivity, resolution or speed. Each photon of emission light is precious.

Now you can use multicolor samples with any label and get image quality like you’ve never seen before. With Airyscan you are always able to select the optimal acquisition strategy for your sample: Simply decide whether you want to gain 1.7x higher resolution in all three dimensions – resulting in a 5x smaller confocal volume. Or push the sensitivity beyond the limits of all conventional confocals. Or use the increase in signal-to-noise ratio to speed up your image acquisition. The choice is yours.

The Airyscan Principle

A classic confocal microscope illuminates one spot on your sample to detect the emitted fluorescence signal. Out-of-focus emission light is rejected at a pinhole, the size of which determines how much of the airy pattern reaches the detector. You can increase the resolution by making the pinhole smaller, but signal-to-noise drops significantly since less valuable emission light is passing through. With Airyscan ZEISS introduces a new concept. Instead of throwing light away at the pinhole, a 32 channel area detector collects all light of an Airy pattern simultaneously. Each detector element functions as a single, very small pinhole. Knowing the beampath and the spatial distribution of each Airy pattern enables a very light efficient imaging: you can now use all of the photons that your objective collected.

It's up to you whether you use the additional information from your sample to get better signal-to-noise, resolution or speed. In the optional Virtual Pinhole Mode, you can decide even after the acquisition, which pinhole size best suits your application.