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CP: Chemische Physik

CP 17: Sondersymposium: Einzelmolekülspektroskopie

CP 17.4: Talk

Thursday, March 12, 1998, 10:10–10:30, H18

Optical far-field microscopy beyond the diffraction limit — •J. Köhler¹, A.M. van Oijen¹, J. Schmidt¹, and G.J. Brakenhoff² — ¹University of Leiden, Huygens Laboratory,The Netherlands — ²University of Amsterdam, Institute for Molecular Biology, The Netherlands

A new technique has been developed to achieve sub-wavelength resolution with conventional far-field optics by a combination of confocal microscopy and single-molecule spectroscopy. The feasibility of this technique is demonstrated on the model system pentacene in p-terphenyl at cryogenic temperatures where lateral resolutions of better than 40 nm (1/20 of the lateral diffraction limit) and axial resolutions of 100 nm (1/65 of the axial resolution limit) were achieved. The method offers the opportunity to extend this principle to specimens labelled with fluorescent dye molecules to elucidate biological structures with unprecedented resolution in light microscopy.