Halfball lens

Half-Ball lenses are variants of ball lenses, obtained by simply cutting the ball lenses in half.Due to ease of mounting brought by the one flat surface,they are ideal for applications where more compact designs are required , such as fiber communication, endoscopy, microscopy, optical pick-up devices, and laser measurement systems.

UV Grade Fused Silica is a synthetic ( manufactured synthetically through the oxidation of high purity silicon by flame hydrolysis) amorphous silicon dioxide consists of extremely pure raw ingredients,with maximum transmission wavelength band from 195 to 2100 nm ,which locates in the ultraviolet region. The low coefficients of thermal expansion contributes to the high thermal stability and resistance to thermal shocks, and the material also features high chemical resistance and minimal fluorescence.It is often a preferred material for precision optics due to its consistent and repeatable optical performance.

Immersion Oil:  Clear, finely detailed images are achieved by contrasting the specimen with their medium.  Changing the refractive index of the specimens from their medium attains this contrast.  The refractive index is a measure of the relative velocity at which light passes through a material.  When light rays pass through the two materials (specimen and medium) that have different refractive indices, the rays change direction from a straight path by bending (refracting) at the boundary between the specimen and the medium.  Thus, this increases the image’s contrast between the specimen and the medium.

Edmund OpticsBall lens

Hangzhou Shalom EO provides both stocked and custom ball lenses and half ball lenses made from N-BK7, UV fused silica, Sapphire and high index optical glass materials.The specification of custom ball and half ball lenses could be varied upon your request.

Ball lenses belong to a special form of biconvex lenses which have the geometry of a ball(sphere). They are  manufactured from a single material, usually an optical glass with good transparency in the wavelength region of interest. The typical applications of ball lenses include focusing light in the field of fibers(e.g. laser to fiber coupling ,fiber to fiber coupling), emitters and detectors , majorly to collimate light depending on geometries of the input light source. Also they could be ball pre-forms of aspheric lenses where they are purposefully deformed in order to prevent spherical aberrations.

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HalfBall lensfocal length

Sapphireball lens

Total magnification: In a compound microscope the total magnification is the product of the objective and ocular lenses (see figure below).  The magnification of the ocular lenses on your scope is 10X.

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High indexBall lens

Resolving power or resolution: the ability to distinguish objects that are close together.  The better the resolving power of the microscope, the closer together two objects can be and still be seen as separate.

Parfocal: the objective lenses are mounted on the microscope so that they can be interchanged without having to appreciably vary the focus.

One way to change the refractive index is by staining the specimen.  Another is to use immersion oil.  While we want light to refract differently between the specimen and the medium, we do not want to lose any light rays, as this would decrease the resolution of the image.  By placing immersion oil between the glass slide and the oil immersion lens (100X), the light rays at the highest magnification can be retained.  Immersion oil has the same refractive index as glass so the oil becomes part of the optics of the microscope.  Without the oil the light rays are refracted as they enter the air between the slide and the lens and the objective lens would have to be increased in diameter in order to capture them.  Using oil has the same effect as increasing the objective diameter therefore improving the resolving power of the lens.