Zeeman laser scanning confocal microscopy in turbid media

A novel Zeeman laser scanning confocal microscope (ZLSCM) is proposed. It has the same configuration as the conventional laser scanning confocal microscope (LSCM) in which a Zeeman laser in conjunction with a Glan-Thompson analyzer are used. In our system, the analyzer and the band pass filter which play the roles of a polarization gate and a coherence gate enhance the collection efficiency of the weak scattering photons and suppress the multiple scattering photons simultaneously. Comparing with the conventional LSCM, the improvement on the depth resolution of ZLSCM in a scattering medium is discussed and demonstrated experimentally.