Plate beamsplitter to produce multiple equal-intensity beams.

Overview

The design of a plate beamsplitter to produce multiple beams of equal intensity is presented. Multiple beams of equal intensity can be obtained from a plate by varying the reflectances of the front and back surfaces. The application for which we designed the plate beamsplitter was a fourbeam multiplexed galvanometric scanner for a confocal scanning microscope. Multiplexing with four beams increases the effective optical scanning rate (and therefore the confocal imaging rate) to four times the electromechanical scanning rate of the galvanometrically driven mirrors.