Superlensing microscope objective lens

Conventional microscope objective lenses are diffraction limited; they cannot resolve subdiffraction features of a size smaller than 250-300 nm under white lighting condition. New innovations are required to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a new superlensing objec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied optics. Optical technology and biomedical optics Vol. 56; no. 11; p. 3142
Main Authors Yan, Bing, Wang, Zengbo, Parker, Alan L, Lai, Yu-Kun, John Thomas, P, Yue, Liyang, Monks, James N
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 10.04.2017
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Summary:Conventional microscope objective lenses are diffraction limited; they cannot resolve subdiffraction features of a size smaller than 250-300 nm under white lighting condition. New innovations are required to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a new superlensing objective lens that possesses a resolution of 100 nm, which is a two-times resolution improvement over conventional objectives. This is accomplished by integrating a conventional microscope objective lens with a superlensing microsphere lens using a customized lens adaptor. The new objective lens was successfully demonstrated for label-free super-resolution imaging of 100 nm features in engineering and biological samples, including a Blu-ray disk sample and adenoviruses. Our work opens a new door to develop a generic optical superlens, which may transform the field of optical microscopy and imaging.
ISSN:2155-3165
DOI:10.1364/AO.56.003142