Patent ID: 8879148

Claim:
An illumination device for a microscope having a detector, the illumination device comprising: a laser unit that generates at least one broadband white light laser pulse having light components of different wavelengths being offset in time from each other; an acousto-optical tunable filter (AOTF) that separates different wavelength intervals from the at least one broadband white light laser pulse received from the laser unit to generate spectrally dispersed laser light pulses having continuous wavelength spectra and being spectrally spaced-apart from one another; and a compensation unit for further spectrally dispersing and temporally offsetting the spectrally dispersed laser light pulses received from the AOTF to generate time discrete white light laser pulses wherein a time offset between a first wavelength packet of one of the time discrete white light laser pulses and another wavelength packet of the respective time discrete white light laser pulses is less than a predetermined time resolution limit of the detector of the microscope.