Resolution Investigation for Microscope Objective Lenses by Rayleigh Criterion

To characterize the resolution of a microscope, it is often practical to following the theory of “Rayleigh Criterion” which was invented by John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh in 1896. The theory defines that when the center of one Airy pattern is just overlapped with the first minimum of another, then they can just be resolved. In this example, we follow Rayleigh’s theory and check the resolution for microscopy objective lenses with different numerical aperture (NA) values.