True optical resolution beyond the Rayleigh limit achieved by standing wave illumination

During the last decade, various efforts have been undertaken to enhance the resolution of optical microscopes, mostly because of their importance in biological sciences. Herein, we describe a method to increase the resolution of fluorescence microscopy by illuminating the specimen with a mesh-like interference pattern of a laser source and electronic postprocessing of the images. We achieve 100-nm optical resolution, an improvement by a factor of more than 2 compared with standard fluorescence microscopy and of 1.5 compared with confocal scanning.

近十年来，学界已开展诸多研究以提升光学显微镜的分辨率，这主要源于其在生命科学领域的重要价值。本文提出一种方法：通过激光源生成的网状干涉图案照射样本，并对采集到的图像进行电子后处理，以此提升荧光显微镜的分辨率。本方法可实现100纳米的光学分辨率，相较于标准荧光显微镜，分辨率提升逾2倍；相较于共聚焦扫描显微镜，分辨率亦提升1.5倍。