Open AccessAchieving superresolution with illumination-enhanced sparsity
Author(s) -
Jinran Yu,
Stephen Becker,
James Folberth,
Bruce Wallin,
Simeng Chen,
Carol J. Cogswell
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - Uncategorized
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.26.009850
Subject(s) - optics , image resolution , numerical aperture , superresolution , resolution (logic) , rayleigh scattering , spatial frequency , fluorophore , microscopy , physics , limit (mathematics) , materials science , computer science , fluorescence , image (mathematics) , computer vision , artificial intelligence , mathematics , wavelength , mathematical analysis
Recent advances in superresolution fluorescence microscopy have been limited by a belief that surpassing two-fold resolution enhancement of the Rayleigh resolution limit requires stimulated emission or the fluorophore to undergo state transitions. Here we demonstrate a new superresolution method that requires only image acquisitions with a focused illumination spot and computational post-processing. The proposed method utilizes the focused illumination spot to effectively reduce the object size and enhance the object sparsity and consequently increases the resolution and accuracy through nonlinear image post-processing. This method clearly resolves 70nm resolution test objects emitting ~530nm light with a 1.4 numerical aperture (NA) objective, and, when imaging through a 0.5NA objective, exhibits high spatial frequencies comparable to a 1.4NA widefield image, both demonstrating a resolution enhancement above two-fold of the Rayleigh resolution limit. More importantly, we examine how the resolution increases with photon numbers, and show that the more-than-two-fold enhancement is achievable with realistic photon budgets.