Question

Name a purpose of immersion oil in light microscopy; What does it do? How does it work? What objective lenses on your microscope should it be used with?

Answer 1

Purpose of immersion oil in light microscope is to increase the resolving power of microscope.

Resolving power of a lens is the ability to differentiate 2 points or lines on an object.

How does it work?

We immerse both specimen and objective lens in a transparent oil. The oil used here should have high refractive index. Then it increases numerical aperture of objective lens and increases resolving power

Objective lens

To use oil immersion technique, 100x objective lens is used.