Issue 13, 2020

Efficiency-enhanced and sidelobe-suppressed super-oscillatory lenses for sub-diffraction-limit fluorescence imaging with ultralong working distance

Abstract

Super-oscillatory lens (SOL) optical microscopy, behaving as a non-invasive and universal imaging technique, as well as being a simple post-processing procedure, may provide a potential application for sub-diffraction-limit fluorescence imaging. However, the low energy concentration, high-intensity sidelobes and micrometer-scale working distance of the reported planar SOLs impose unavoidable restrictions on the ground-state applications. Here, we demonstrate step-shaped SOLs based on the multiple-phase-modulated (MPM) method to improve the focusing efficiency. Two pivotal advantages are thus generated: (i) the fabrication complexity can be effectively reduced based on several conventional optical lithography steps; (ii) the focusing efficiency is much higher than that of the random MPM ones due to the efficient manipulation of the wavefronts, bringing about a stronger light concentration to the focal spot. Additionally, the ratio of the sidelobe intensity is flexibly tuned to meet the customized requirements, and a 2 mm-working-distance MPM SOL with the sidelobe intensity highly suppressed is finally exploited. For the first time, as far as we know, a SOL-based fluorescence microscopy without the pinhole filter to map the horizontal morphology of the dispersive fluorescent particles is established. Compared with the results achieved by the conventional wide-field microscopy, the sample details beating the diffraction limit can be reconstructed by simple imaging fusion. This research demonstrates the promising applications of SOLs for low-cost, simplified and highly customized sub-diffraction-limit fluorescence imaging systems free from photobleaching and an extremely short working distance.

Graphical abstract: Efficiency-enhanced and sidelobe-suppressed super-oscillatory lenses for sub-diffraction-limit fluorescence imaging with ultralong working distance

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
19 Dec 2019
Accepted
06 Mar 2020
First published
06 Mar 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale, 2020,12, 7063-7071

Efficiency-enhanced and sidelobe-suppressed super-oscillatory lenses for sub-diffraction-limit fluorescence imaging with ultralong working distance

W. Li, P. He, W. Yuan and Y. Yu, Nanoscale, 2020, 12, 7063 DOI: 10.1039/C9NR10697A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements