Abstract
Biological research requires wide-field optical imaging techniques with resolution down to the nanometer scale to study the biological process in a sub-cell or single molecular level. To meet this requirement, wide-field structured illumination method (WFSIM) has been extensively studied. The resolution of WFSIM is determined by the period of the optical interference pattern. However, in traditional WFSIM this period is diffraction limited so that pattern having periodicity smaller than 100 nm cannot be generated and as a result achieving an imaging resolution better than 50 nm is a great challenge. Here, we demonstrate a wide-field optical nanoimaging method based on a meta-sandwich structure (MSS) model. It is found that this structure can support standing wave surface plasmons interference pattern with a period of only 31 nm for 532 nm wavelength incident light. Furthermore, the potential application of the MSS for wide-field super-resolution imaging is discussed and the simulation results show an imaging resolution of sub-20 nm can be achieved. The demonstrated method paves a new route for the improvement of the wide field optical nanoimaging, which can be applied by biological researchers to study biological process conducted in cell membrane, such as mass transportation and others.
Highlights
Surface plasmons (SPs), formed by collective oscillations of free electrons of the metal, are evanescent surface electromagnetic waves exists at the interface between a noble metal and a dielectric[1, 2]
We proposed a simple and tunable meta-sandwich structure (MSS) which can support even higher ksp
In comparison with traditional multilayer metamaterial structure and gradient permittivity meta-structure, MSS is more simple and elegant and it supports SPs wave with even higher wavevectors
Summary
Surface plasmons (SPs), formed by collective oscillations of free electrons of the metal, are evanescent surface electromagnetic waves exists at the interface between a noble metal and a dielectric[1, 2]. SPs were introduced in far-field microscopy, i.e. plasmonic structured illumination microscopy (PSIM), to improve imaging resolution even further[15,16,17,18,19]. In those works, SP interference pattern was used for illumination, i.e. structured light was used to realize a lateral resolution enhancement of a fluorescence image. We proposed a simple and tunable meta-sandwich structure (MSS) which can support even higher ksp. By incorporating this structure in PSIM, an even higher imaging resolution can be achieved. A resolution of 16 nm could be achieved in one dimension in PSIM by employing the proposed MSS structure as the illumination source in plasmonic based microscopy
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