Microsphere-aided Optical Microscopy and its Applications for Super-Resolution Imaging

• Main Authors: Upputuri, Paul Kumar, Pramanik, Manojit
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Super-resolution; Microsphere
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/84064; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/42920
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The spatial resolution of a standard optical microscope (SOM) is limited by diffraction. In visible spectrum, SOM can provide ∼200nm resolution. To break the diffraction limit several approaches were developed including scanning near field microscopy, metamaterial super-lenses, nanoscale solid immersion lenses, super-oscillatory lenses, confocal fluorescence microscopy, techniques that exploit non-linear response of fluorophores like stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy, etc. Recently, photonic nanojet generated by a dielectric microsphere was used to break the diffraction limit. The microsphere-approach is simple, cost-effective and can be implemented under a standard microscope, hence it has gained enormous attention for super-resolution imaging. In this article, we briefly review the microsphere approach and its applications for super-resolution imaging in various optical imaging modalities.