Transmission Scanning Acoustic Microscopy for Tilted Plate Specimens

Abstract

<p>In transmission scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) [1,2,3] the plate-specimen under examination is usually aligned with its surface normal parallel to the lens axis in order to optimize the spatial resolution. However, we have found that in many instances a higher acoustic transmission and additional image contents can be facilitated by tilting the specimen such that its surface normal is at a small angle with respect to the lens axis (Fig. 1). For a small tilt angle, the image degradation due to reduced spatial resolution is insignificant with relatively small numerical aperture lenses.</p>