Invited Article: Saturation scattering competition for non-fluorescence single-wavelength super-resolution imaging

Xueying Ouyang,Ziheng Ji,Jian Xu,Tianyue Zhang,Xiangping Li,Fei Qin,Ziwei Feng,Kebin Shi,Shenyu Yang,Yaoyu Cao,Lingxiang Jiang

doi:10.1063/1.5043533

Abstract

Stimulated emission depletion nanoscopy and its derivatives based on saturation induced competition effects have become an indispensable tool for studying cellular events and their dynamics in living conditions. The successful implementation of these techniques heavily relies on the competition between excitation induced spontaneous emission and stimulated emission from fluorescent dyes. The use of two laser beams at different wavelengths perplexes the optical system and the high intensity saturation beam inevitably introduces detrimental photobleaching effects. Harnessing the emerging saturation scattering of plasmonic nanoparticles, here, we demonstrate a novel fluorescence-free single-wavelength super-resolution imaging technique using gold nanoparticles. A lateral resolution of 101.2 nm (&lt;λ/5) is achieved through introducing saturation scattering competition (SSC) of 60 nm gold nanospheres between dual beams at the same wavelength. In addition, the SSC drastically reduces the saturation intensity by three orders of magnitude than the conventional stimulated emission depletion process at comparable resolutions. As a proof of concept, we realized robust single-wavelength super-resolved imaging in dMG-63 cells with a simplified system. The current technique provides a new modality of biosample-friendly technology for optical super-resolution imaging.

Highlights

It is an essential requirement to understand phenomena and mechanisms of life science from the microscopic level
A novel non-fluorescence super-resolution imaging technique named as saturated excitation microscopy (SAX) based on the saturation scattering (SS) effect of plasmonic nanoparticles[34] emerged recently, which can be used as a robust contrast agent for super-resolution optical microscopy due to the absence of bleaching effects.[35,36,37,38,39]
Consider a condition that a gold nanoparticle illuminated by two light beams simultaneously

Summary

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INTRODUCTION

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

EXPERIMENTAL SECTION