title: True optical resolution beyond the Rayleigh limit achieved by standing wave illumination.
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.
authors.affiliation: Nanotechnology Group, Institute of Robotics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Tannenstrasse 3, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: J T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Frohn
authors.forename: H F
authors.initials: HF
authors.lastname: Knapp
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stemmer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D008856:Microscopy, Fluorescence / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity