Abstract
Intensity correlation microscopy (ICM), which is prominently known through antibunching microscopy or super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (SOFI), provides super-resolution through a correlation analysis of antibunching of independent quantum emitters or temporal fluctuations of blinking fluorophores. For correlation order m the PSF in the signal is effectively taken to the mth power, and is thus directly shrunk by the factor m. Combined with deconvolution, a close to linear resolution improvement of factor m can be obtained. Yet, analysis of high correlation orders is challenging, which limits the achievable resolutions. Here we propose to use three dimensional structured illumination along with mth-order correlation analysis to obtain an enhanced scaling of up to m + m = 2m. Including the stokes shift or plasmonic sub-wavelength illumination enhancements beyond 2m can be achieved. Hence, resolutions far below the diffraction limit in full 3D imaging and with already low correlation orders, can potentially be achieved. Since ICM operates in the linear regime our approach may be particularly promising for enhancing the resolution in biological imaging at low illumination levels.
Highlights
Since it was first shown that the resolution limit, posed by diffraction, can be overcome [1], a variety of superresolution microscopy methods have been developed
While the two approaches make use of different physical processes their final signals take the same form such that we identify them as structured illumination intensity correlation microscopy (SI-ICM)
In this paper we proposed to enhance the resolution power of ICM through the addition of 3D structured illumination
Summary
Since it was first shown that the resolution limit, posed by diffraction, can be overcome [1], a variety of superresolution microscopy methods have been developed. Other methods stochastically localize single photoswitchable molecules via centroid fitting of the PSF [4,5,6,7] Another branch of methods makes use of intensity correlations that are evaluated from an image series [8,9,10]. For these intensity correlation microscopy (ICM) techniques, statistically blinking fluorophores [8] or quantum emitters that exhibit anti-bunching [9] can be used to enhance the resolut√ion, both in widefield [9] or confocal microscopy [10], by shrinking the effective PSF by the factor m (with correlation order m), and leading to a resolution improvement of up to factor m when including deconvolution. SI-ICM bears the potential for full 3D deep-subwavelength resolution at low illumination levels
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