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Since its creation, the reduction in size of the spectroscope has resulted in a balance between resolution, bandwidth, and signal-to-noise ratio. Up until now, downsized demonstrations have struggled to surmount the technical hurdles of achieving both extremely high resolution (reaching the scale of picometers) and wide bandwidth (exceeding 100 nanometers) at the same time. Nonetheless, these capabilities are fundamental prerequisites for analytical spectroscopy tools in diverse applications such as biomedical sensing and industrial chemical monitoring. They are also critical for compact optical imaging systems like spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), which demand substantial imaging depth and superior spatial resolution.
The LED-integrated excitation cube (LEC) is compact, low-cost, and easy to install, taking full advantage of the benefits of LED excitations, and can be used in any fluorescent microscope.