Superlensing Microscope Objective Lens

TL;DR

This paper introduces a superlensing microscope objective lens that doubles the resolution of conventional lenses, enabling label-free imaging of nanoscale biological and engineering samples, with potential for commercial development.

Contribution

A novel superlensing objective lens combining a conventional lens with a microsphere lens via 3D printing, achieving 100 nm resolution for super-resolution microscopy.

Findings

Achieved 100 nm resolution surpassing conventional limits.

Enabled label-free imaging of biological and engineering samples.

Demonstrated potential for commercial superlens development.

Abstract

Conventional microscope objective lenses are diffraction limited, which means that they cannot resolve features smaller than half the illumination wavelength. Under white light illumination, such resolution limit is about 250-300 nm for an ordinary microscope. In this paper, we demonstrate a new superlensing objective lens which has a resolution of about 100 nm, offering at least two times resolution improvement over conventional objectives in resolution. This is achieved by integrating a conventional microscope objective lens with a superlensing microsphere lens using a 3D printed lens adaptor. The new objective lens was used for label-free super-resolution imaging of 100 nm-sized engineering and biological samples, including a Blu-ray disc sample, semiconductor chip and adenoviruses. Our work creates a solid base for developing a commercially-viable superlens prototype, which has potential to transform the field of optical microscopy and imaging.