UC San Diego

Fluorescence super-resolution microscopy has, over the last two decades, been extensively developed to access deep-subwavelength nanoscales optically. Label-free super-resolution technologies however have only achieved a slight improvement compared to the diffraction limit. In this context, we demonstrate a label-free imaging method, i.e., hyperbolic material enhanced scattering (HMES) nanoscopy, which breaks the diffraction limit by tailoring the light-matter interaction between the specimens and a hyperbolic material substrate. By exciting the highly confined evanescent hyperbolic polariton modes with dark-field detection, HMES nanoscopy successfully shows a high-contrast scattering image with a spatial resolution around 80 nm. Considering the wavelength at 532 nm and detection optics with a 0.6 numerical aperture (NA) objective lens, this value represents a 5.5-fold resolution improvement beyond the diffraction limit. HMES provides capabilities for super-resolution imaging where fluorescence is not available or challenging to apply.