Carl Zeiss Axio Scope.A1 materials microscope

The flexible Axio Scope.A1 microscope system from Carl Zeiss is now being offered in a version for polarisation microscopy. With minimum effort, six different versions of the microscope can be specially and economically configured for polarisation techniques.

With the system, the company provides a flexible, high-performance modular microscope platform specially designed for routine applications in materials microscopy. The microscope is specifically designed for use in universities and colleges, research institutes in the fields of the geosciences and mineralogy and in the oil exploration industry.

Axio Scope.A1 for polarisation can also be used in materialography applications in, for example, the building materials, glass, plastics, mining, textile and fibre industries. A version of the microscope system is also available as a training microscope for use in education. Further capabilities include conoscopy for crystal diagnosis, the use of numerous other measuring techniques and documentation.

Its modular design offers an interface between the upper and lower parts of the stand to allow the use of spacers for adapting microscope slides to the sample size. The flexible configuration of the components available provides versions for transmitted light, reflected light or both with up to 100 W light intensity. This high light intensity also makes the system suitable for weakly reflecting samples. In addition to traditional contrasting techniques in reflected and transmitted light such as brightfield, darkfield, DIC and polarisation, it now also enables innovative techniques such as C-DIC and PlasDIC. It is possible to quickly and easily switch between the different contrasting techniques.

The line of high-contrast EC Epiplan objectives was specially developed for routine applications. They produce a flat image for a 23 mm field and are available in brightfield and brightfield/darkfield versions. As they are produced with low strain, they are suitable for high-quality DIC microscopy. This line of objectives enables the innovative C-DIC technique (differential interference contrast in circularly polarised light) with only a single prism. Furthermore, the entire spectrum of objectives from the company is available.

The microscope system can be used with traditional cameras, with all cameras in the AxioCam line and with AxioVision image processing software.

Due to its modular design, many components can be easily retrofitted by the user, if required.