Abstract
Abstract Probing light–matter interaction at the nanometer scale is one of the most fascinating topics of modern optics. Its importance is underlined by the large span of fields in which such accurate knowledge of light–matter interaction is needed, namely nanophotonics, quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, biosensing, quantum computing and many more. Increasing innovations in the field of microscopy in the last decade have pushed the ability of observing such phenomena across multiple length scales, from micrometers to nanometers. In bioimaging, the advent of super-resolution single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) has opened a completely new perspective for the study and understanding of molecular mechanisms, with unprecedented resolution, which take place inside the cell. Since then, the field of SMLM has been continuously improving, shifting from an initial drive for pushing technological limitations to the acquisition of new knowledge. Interestingly, such developments have become also of great interest for the study of light–matter interaction in nanostructured materials, either dielectric, metallic, or hybrid metallic-dielectric. The purpose of this review is to summarize the recent advances in the field of nanophotonics that have leveraged SMLM, and conversely to show how some concepts commonly used in nanophotonics can benefit the development of new microscopy techniques for biophysics. To this aim, we will first introduce the basic concepts of SMLM and the observables that can be measured. Then, we will link them with their corresponding physical quantities of interest in biophysics and nanophotonics and we will describe state-of-the-art experiments that apply SMLM to nanophotonics. The problem of localization artifacts due to the interaction of the fluorescent emitter with a resonant medium and possible solutions will be also discussed. Then, we will show how the interaction of fluorescent emitters with plasmonic structures can be successfully employed in biology for cell profiling and membrane organization studies. We present an outlook on emerging research directions enabled by the synergy of localization microscopy and nanophotonics.
Highlights
Nanophotonics is the science of light–matter interaction at the nanometer scale, with the dual goals of controlling the propagation, generation, and detection of light on one hand, and on the other hand of detecting, imaging, and manipulating material degrees of freedom with spatial resolutions down to nanometers [1, 2]
The first applications of such techniques were mainly found in the life sciences, they address issues that are common to the study of nanophotonic structures, such as time-resolved nanometer scale measurements of light–matter interaction at the single emitter level
This review provided an overview of recent work in nanophotonics that uses fluorescence-based super-resolution microscopy techniques, with a particular emphasis on single-molecule localization microscopy, and of recent work in biophysics in which nanophotonic effects are employed
Summary
Nanophotonics is the science of light–matter interaction at the nanometer scale, with the dual goals of controlling the propagation, generation, and detection of light on one hand, and on the other hand of detecting, imaging, and manipulating material degrees of freedom with spatial resolutions down to nanometers [1, 2]. Betzig to separate the detection of single emitters of densely labeled samples in the farfield, spurred the development of alternative methods that use single-molecule localization in wide-field images [59] Among these methods are PhotoActivatable Localization Microscopy (PALM) [60], fluorescence PALM (fPALM) [61], Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) [62], direct STORM (dSTORM) [63], Point Accumulation for Imaging in Nanoscale Topography (PAINT) microscopy [64], and more recently MINimal photon FLUXes (MINFLUX) [65], which are all grouped under the umbrella of the acronym SMLM
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