2016/10/31 by Nicolai T. Urban, Matthew R. Foreman, Urban, Nicolai T. +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #physics.bio-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1611.00045
arxiv created 2016/10/31 · arxiv updated 2016/11/04
We demonstrate stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy with 20 nm gold nanospheres coated by fluorescent silica. Compared with previous demonstrations of STED with a hybrid plasmonic fluorescent label, the current implementation offers a substantially smaller label and a better resolution improvement of up to 2.5-fold beyond the diffraction limit of confocal microscopy. This is achieved at approximately 2 times lower intensity than conventional STED based on dyes alone, and in an aqueous environment, demonstrating the relevance to bio-imaging. Finally, we also show, for the first time in this context, a 3-fold reduction in the rate of photobleaching compared to standard dye-based STED, thus, enabling brighter images.