The research will develop a unique optical instrument for super resolution imaging at ultra-fast speed. The instrument will be the first optical imaging tool that has unprecedented resolution in both space (~50nm scale) and time (~20ms scale) simultaneously. It will have a profound impact to the fields of physical science, biomedical imaging and to fields where both high resolution and high speed optical imaging are required.
An innovative combination of plasmonics, structured illumination microscopy, and optical tweezers, will allow a host of fundamental studies on the nanoscale interactions and real-time dynamics of living cells that are impossible to conduct by any other presently available instrument. Localized plasmonic structured illumination (LPSIM) is a structured illumination microscopy (SIM) technique and the plasmonic antenna array provides deep sub-wavelength illumination patterns, leading to much higher resolution in a final reconstructed image. .