Hyperbolic metamaterial-assisted structured illumination microscopy using periodic sub-diffraction speckles

Abstract

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM), as a wide-field, rapid, super-resolution imaging technology, is widely employed in the field of biology. In this work, we propose a hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM)-assisted super-resolution structured illumination microscopy technique. By utilizing the HMM, a sub-diffraction illumination pattern of bulk plasmon polariton (BPP) with pure and higher spatial frequency replaces the conventional laser interference fringes, thus the imaging resolution of BPPSIM could surpass that of conventional SIM and reach 65 nm for HMM with 8-layers periodic structure. Moreover, an HMM with 10-layers aperiodic structure designed with particle swarm optimization was obtained, and BPPSIM could bring the imaging resolution down to 60 nm (1/9 of the fluorescence wavelength), which is a 3.3-fold improvement compared with the diffraction-limited image. This BPPSIM would provide a super-resolution, wide field of view, and good bio-compatibility approach in biological imaging.