Resolution Investigation of a Microscopy System by Abbe Criterion

The resolution of a microscopy system is often characterized by Abbe criterion. It explained that the filtering of the grating (as a sample) diffraction orders in the back focal plane depends on the numerical aperture (NA) of the objective lens. When the higher diffraction orders are filtered out, the interference at the image plane does not happen, which leads to no image. This use case demonstrates how the NA influences the filtering effect and the resolution.