Subsurface Super-resolution Imaging of Unstained Polymer Nanostructures.

ABSTRACT: Optical imaging has offered unique advantages in material researches, such as spectroscopy and lifetime measurements of deeply embedded materials, which cannot be matched using electron or scanning-probe microscopy. Unfortunately, conventional optical imaging cannot provide the spatial resolutions necessary for many nanoscopic studies. Despite recent rapid progress, super-resolution optical imaging has yet to be widely applied to non-biological materials. Herein we describe a method for nanoscopic optical imaging of buried polymer nanostructures without the need for extrinsic staining. We observed intrinsic stochastic fluorescence emission or blinking from unstained polymers and performed spatial-temporal spectral analysis to investigate its origin. We further applied photon localization super-resolution imaging reconstruction to the detected stochastic blinking, and achieved a spatial resolution of at least 100?nm, which corresponds to a six-fold increase over the optical diffraction limit. This work demonstrates the potential for studying the static heterogeneities of intrinsic polymer molecular-specific properties at sub-diffraction-limited optical resolutions.

SUBMITTER: Urban BE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4926209 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature