ImmersionChambers

Overview

Alignment

💡 Misalignment of the immersion chamber may lead to lower quality of your images, due to introduction of astigmatism in the detection path.

The immersion chamber has 3 degrees of possible misalignment, which are controlled by 3 brass knobs on the kinematic prism table that holds the chamber. Vertical aligment (2 degrees of freedom) can be done with a standard spirit (bubble) level:

• place a flat plate (glass or metal) on top of the chamber, and put the bubble level on it.
• adjust the two knobs of RadiantDyes kinematic table to level the bubble.
• check if this level matches the level of the base breadboard.

These steps align your two horizontal surfaces (chamber upper edges and base breadboard) to a common reference vector (gravity).

For the last, third degree of freedom (horizontal misaligment relative to excitation and detection), push the chamber wall against one of the 6-mm rods (photo TODO), and visually align the gap between the chamber wall and the rod. The rod is assumed to be parallel to the excitation (light-sheet) plane, and perpendicular to the detection path by the design, if you aligned excitation and detection modules with a try square as suggested in the relevant sections.