Luminescent scanning confocal microscope modified for observation of arbitrarily oriented single quantum systems

A modified distribution of the light field of an exciting laser radiation entering into the objective of a scanning confocal microscope is proposed, for which the focused beam in the course of scanning is capable of exciting all absorbing dipoles with arbitrary orientation at approximately the same efficiency. Calculations show that the ratio of maximum luminescence intensities for the most and least favorably oriented dipoles amounts to 47%. Analogous calculations have been performed for other distributions of the input light field and the excitation efficiency is compared to that of the proposed field.