Improving Microscope Resolution with Plasmonic Metasurfaces

While imaging cells using real-time fluorescence microscopy methods, professor Kaoru Tamada of Kyushu University’s Institute for Materials Chemistry and Engineering and her group found that they could improve resolution under a conventional widefield microscope close to the diffraction limit by simply changing the surface beneath the cells. The researchers demonstrated that using a glass surface embedded with self-assembled gold nanoparticles can improve resolution of conventional microscopes and image living cells at high speeds. A mouse fibroblast cell imaged on a metasurface made of gold nanoparticles under a total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscope exhibits enhanced and confined emission from...