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

Frohn, J T; Knapp, H F; Stemmer, A · Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · 2000

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

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.

Medical subject headings