Subsurface Super-resolution Imaging of Unstained Polymer Nanostructures
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Abstract
Optical imaging has offered unique advantages in material researches, such as spectroscopy and lifetime measurements of deeply embedded materials, which cannot be matched using electron or scanning-probe microscopy. Unfortunately, conventional optical imaging cannot provide the spatial resolutions necessary for many nanoscopic studies. Despite recent rapid progress, super-resolution optical imaging has yet to be widely applied to non-biological materials. Herein we describe a method for nanoscopic optical imaging of buried polymer nanostructures without the need for extrinsic staining. We observed intrinsic stochastic fluorescence emission or blinking from unstained polymers and performed spatial-temporal spectral analysis to investigate its origin. We further applied photon localization super-resolution imaging reconstruction to the detected stochastic blinking, and achieved a spatial resolution of at least 100 nm, which corresponds to a six-fold increase over the optical diffraction limit. This work demonstrates the potential for studying the static heterogeneities of intrinsic polymer molecular-specific properties at sub-diffraction-limited optical resolutions.
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