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Objectives Project NanoVisionOver the centuries the microscope has gone thorough series of radical developments. However, one thing has never changed, objective lens is used to illuminate the sample. In optical microscopes the illumination light-path is as important as the detection light-path to provide images of high quality. The main recipe for delivering super-resolution is to perform laser-beam engineering or to harness the photo-kinetics of the fluorophores itself. However, until now, all variants of available nanoscopy methods use bulk and costly opto-mechanical components to perform laser beam engineering in the free-space and use microscope objective lens to deliver laser light at the sample stage. This approach is prone to misalignment. Therefore, successful implementation requires well-calibrated optics hosted in a stable and mechanically rigid platform, consequently increasing their cost and hindering parallelization for high throughput. Furthermore, the present optical nanoscopy methods use the same objective lens to deliver the light and to collect the signal from the sample back. This enforces coupling of illumination and detection light paths, which in turn also limits the throughput-out. The radical novelty of NanoVision is that it shifts the role of laser beam engineering from bulk optical components to compact engineered photonic-chip platform. The entire capability of such microscope is then determined by the capability of the photonic chip to engineer light. As explained next, this transfer of role of illumination to the photonic chip provides a radical jump in cost, flexibility, as well as scalability. Chip-based nanoscopy has demonstrated the largest area or field-of-view (FOV) [1], [2], [3] ever reported with super-resolution (70 nm resolution over 500 x 500 µm2), an improvement of 100 times over the conventional SMLM method. This delivers high-throughput super-resolution imaging solution for the first time.
NanoVision main objectives are to
[1] R. Diekmann, Ø. I. Helle, et.al, Nature Phot. 11 (5), 322, 2017 [2] Øystein I. Helle, et.al" Opt. Express 27, 6700-6710 (2019) [3] Helle, Ø.I.,. et al. Nat. Photonics 14, 431-438 (2020) |