Digital twins for 3D confocal microscopy

We present three digital twins for microscopy capable of simulating the image formation, the back focal plane formation and the near-field of confocal microscopes. For this, the light-surface interaction and the near-field are simulated using three different rigorous methods, the finite element method, the Fourier modal method and the boundary element method. The back focal plane formation and the image formation are simulated using three different Fourier optics implementations. The microscope modelling is done for ideal optical components, but can be extended to non-ideal optical components if the details of the optical components are known. The three models provide high accuracy and advantages with respect to the computational effort as a full 3D model is applied to 2D structures and the lateral scanning process of the confocal microscope is considered without repeating the time consuming rigorous simulation of the scattering process. The accuracy of the models are proven by comparison of the methods.