Ablation is a general term referring to the shrinking/shrinking of material, whether it is the evaporation of matter by high temperature or laser beam (laser ablation), the loss of material due to weathering (ablation in geology) or other means. In microscopy, ablation is one of the photo-stimulating applications of active illumination modules with a laser radiation source used as an adjunct to confocal microscopes, allowing the realization of photo-manipulation experiments while simultaneously capturing their progress and consequences very quickly in the confocal plane. Other photo-stimulation applications of active illumination modules are FRAP, optogenetics, photo-bleaching, photo-activation, so-called uncaging and many more.
