Figure 1.

Airyscan detector in Airyscan mode (A) and Airyscan FAST mode (B). (A) The Airyscan detector consists of 32 hexagonal elements arranged in a circular disk. Each detector element acts as a pinhole the size of 0.2 Airy Units (AU). The whole detector captures the light equivalent to a pinhole of 1.25 AU. As the sample is scanned by point spot illumination from the laser, the Airy disk arising from a point emitter will be scanned by the detector. Through deconvolution and pixel reassignment, the individual images from each detector element are shifted to the center position to yield a final super-resolution image with resolutions of 120 nm in x and y and 350 nm in z. (B) In the FAST mode, the illumination is shaped like a short elliptical line. Each detector element has an equivalent pinhole size of 0.3 AU, and the central 16 elements of the detector will capture the light from 0.9 AU in x and 1.6 AU in y. Because the elliptical line scans four spots simultaneously instead of one, it scans the sample four times faster than in the regular Airyscan mode.