Compact structured illumination microscopy with high spatial frequency diffractive lattice patterns

Abstract

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) enables live-cell super-resolution imaging with wide field of view (FOV) and high imaging speed, but the illumination system is usually bulky. With the advantages of small structure and high efficiency, lattice patterns assisted by diffractive optical elements (DOEs) have been used for structured illumination in SIM. But it is still challenging to raise the spatial frequency of diffractive lattice patterns when using traditional DOE design method, and thus the super-resolution imaging performance is restricted. In this paper, we propose a novel design method for DOE to generate lattice patterns with spatial frequency close to the cut-off frequency. It is the first time to obtain a lattice pattern with such high spatial frequency by diffractive optics. Finally, the proposed SIM achieves a lateral resolution of 131 nm at 519 nm fluorescent light while maintaining an original size as a standard inverted fluorescence microscope by only inserting a single well-designed DOE in the illumination optical path, which may promote this compact SIM applied in super-resolution imaging field.