Department of Chemistry, University College London , 20 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AJ, United Kingdom.
Unit of Electro-optics Engineering, Ben-Gurion University , Beer-Sheba 8410501, Israel.
ACS Nano. 2016 Nov 22;10(11):10454-10461. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.6b06361. Epub 2016 Nov 3.
Plasmonic nanoparticles influence the absorption and emission processes of nearby emitters due to local enhancements of the illuminating radiation and the photonic density of states. Here, we use the plasmon resonance of metal nanoparticles in order to enhance the stimulated depletion of excited molecules for super-resolved nanoscopy. We demonstrate stimulated emission depletion (STED) nanoscopy with gold nanorods with a long axis of only 26 nm and a width of 8 nm. These particles provide an enhancement of up to 50% of the resolution compared to fluorescent-only probes without plasmonic components irradiated with the same depletion power. The nanoparticle-assisted STED probes reported here represent a ∼2 × 10 reduction in probe volume compared to previously used nanoparticles. Finally, we demonstrate their application toward plasmon-assisted STED cellular imaging at low-depletion powers, and we also discuss their current limitations.
由于局部增强的照明辐射和光子态密度，等离子体纳米粒子会影响附近发射器的吸收和发射过程。在这里，我们使用金属纳米粒子的等离子体共振来增强受激耗尽激发分子，以实现超分辨纳米显微镜。我们使用长径仅为 26nm 且宽度为 8nm 的金纳米棒进行了受激光致荧光（STED）纳米显微镜实验。与没有等离子体成分的荧光探针相比，在相同的耗尽功率下，这些粒子的分辨率提高了高达 50%。与之前使用的纳米粒子相比，报告的这种纳米粒子辅助的 STED 探针的探针体积减少了约 2×10。最后，我们在低耗尽功率下展示了它们在等离子体辅助 STED 细胞成像中的应用，并讨论了它们目前的局限性。
