Isotropic 3D Super-resolution Imaging with a Self-bending Point Spread Function

Shu Jia; Joshua C Vaughan; Xiaowei Zhuang

doi:10.1038/nphoton.2014.13

Isotropic 3D Super-resolution Imaging with a Self-bending Point Spread Function

Nat Photonics. 2014:8:302-306. doi: 10.1038/nphoton.2014.13.

Authors

Shu Jia¹, Joshua C Vaughan¹, Xiaowei Zhuang²

Affiliations

¹ Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA ; Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
² Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA ; Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA ; Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Abstract

Airy beams maintain their intensity profiles over a large propagation distance without substantial diffraction and exhibit lateral bending during propagation^1-5. This unique property has been exploited for micromanipulation of particles⁶, generation of plasma channels⁷ and guidance of plasmonic waves⁸, but has not been explored for high-resolution optical microscopy. Here, we introduce a self-bending point spread function (SB-PSF) based on Airy beams for three-dimensional (3D) super-resolution fluorescence imaging. We designed a side-lobe-free SB-PSF and implemented a two-channel detection scheme to enable unambiguous 3D localization of fluorescent molecules. The lack of diffraction and the propagation-dependent lateral bending make the SB-PSF well suited for precise 3D localization of molecules over a large imaging depth. Using this method, we obtained super-resolution imaging with isotropic 3D localization precision of 10-15 nm over a 3 μm imaging depth from ∼2000 photons per localization.

Abstract

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