Superlensing microscope objective lens.

ABSTRACT

Conventional microscope objective lenses are diffraction limited; they cannot resolve subdiffraction features of a size smaller than 250-300 nm under white lighting condition. New innovations are required to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a new superlensing objective lens that possesses a resolution of 100 nm, which is a two-times resolution improvement over conventional objectives. This is accomplished by integrating a conventional microscope objective lens with a superlensing microsphere lens using a customized lens adaptor. The new objective lens was successfully demonstrated for label-free super-resolution imaging of 100 nm features in engineering and biological samples, including a Blu-ray disk sample and adenoviruses. Our work opens a new door to develop a generic optical superlens, which may transform the field of optical microscopy and imaging.