Goals

Confocal microscopy has triggered a new era in development of light microscopy. Nowadays, confocal microscopy is an established three-dimensional imaging technique, which has already been used in the biological and medical sciences for quite some time. However, the advantages of confocal microscopy for studies of soft condensed matter systems are only beginning to be explored.

We intend to show the capabilities of the confocal technique in studies of liquid crystals. Even though, confocal microscopy can be also employed to image positional order, in here we focus on the capabilities of the approach we call "Fluorescent Confocal Polarizing Microscopy" (FCPM) to visualize orientational ordering only.