Label-Free Super-Resolution Microscopy

This book presents the advances in super-resolution microscopy in physics and biomedical optics for nanoscale imaging. In the last decade, super-resolved fluorescence imaging has opened new horizons in improving the resolution of optical microscopes far beyond the classical diffraction limit, leading to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014. This book represents the first comprehensive review of a different type of super-resolved microscopy, which does not rely on using fluorescent markers. Such label-free super-resolution microscopy enables potentially even broader applications in life sciences and nanoscale imaging, but is much more challenging and it is based on different physical concepts and approaches. A unique feature of this book is that it combines insights into mechanisms of label-free super-resolution with a vast range of applications from fast imaging of living cells to inorganic nanostructures. This book can be used by researchers in biological and medical physics. Due to its logically organizational structure, it can be also used as a teaching tool in graduate and upper-division undergraduate-level courses devoted to super-resolved microscopy, nanoscale imaging, microscopy instrumentation, and biomedical imaging.

Vasily N. Astratov has been professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte since 2002. In 1986, he received his Ph.D. degree from the A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in Russia. Since joining UNC-Charlotte in 2002, his research has been devoted to a new field of study which he has named "microspherical photonics" to describe the applications of dielectric microspheres in super-resolution microscopy, resonant light forces, photonic nanojets, and photonic molecules. In his lab, he proposed and developed the methods of super-resolution imaging based on using high-index dielectric microspheres immersed in liquids or in elastomeric slabs. His methods are widely used by many groups worldwide for imaging subcellular structures, viruses, and nanoplasmonic structures. He also observed giant light forces exerted on microspheres under resonant conditions with their whispering gallery modes. This observation builds upon earlier pioneering work of Arthur Ashkin and Joseph M. Dziedzic on optical forces exerted on microdroplets. Previously, in the mid-1990s he pioneered studies of synthetic opals as novel three-dimensional photonic crystals for visible light. He has authored and co-authored about 180 research publications and 15 patents which have been cited more than 6000 times.