Understanding the effect of scattered evanescent light

Evanescent-wave scattering is a topic in classical electrodynamics and in the study of colloidal particles near a boundary. However, how such near-surface scattering at sub-cellular refractive-index heterogeneities degrades the excitation confinement in biological total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy has not been well studied. Carine Julien and Martin Oheim of SPPIN’s biophysics teams now addressed this very relevant question in a commentary published in the Biophysical Journal : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34509502/