High-fidelity far-field microscopy at {\lambda}/8 resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-fidelity far-field microscopy technique achieving 69 nm resolution using a novel diffractive optical element and advanced deconvolution, overcoming efficiency and sidelobe issues of traditional super-resolution methods.

Contribution

It presents a new far-field super-resolution microscopy method with enhanced diffraction efficiency and high-fidelity imaging at nanoscale resolution.

Findings

Achieved 69 nm resolution in far-field microscopy.

Enhanced diffraction efficiency by over two orders of magnitude.

Reconstructed high-fidelity images of complex samples.

Abstract

The emergence of far-field super-resolution microscopy has rejuvenated the possibility for nanoscale imaging. Approaches to far-field super-resolution that utilize point scanning often depends on spatially reducing the size of the focused spot. However, the focused spot always achieves high resolution at the expense of extremely low light efficiency for the probing mainlobe and high-intensity sidelobes, which limits the applications in nanoscale imaging and might cause misinterpretation of samples. Here we report a sharp probing spot with the diffraction efficiency of 3.76% at the resolution of 38% of the Airy spot size assisted by the two-dimensional multi-level diffractive optical element (DOE) experimentally. The diffraction efficiency of DOE is improved by at least two orders of magnitude at the same resolution by breaking the limitation of circular 0-{\pi} binary structure superoscillatory lens. To eliminate the influence of the high-intensity sidelobes, high-fidelity images are reconstructed based on the modified deconvolution algorithm by virtue of the prior-knowledge. Finally, high-fidelity far-field microscopy (HiFi-FM) is constructed and experimental results show that HiFi-FM allows the resolution of spatially complex samples better than 69 nm while acquiring high fidelity.