Lensfree On-Chip Near-field Microscopy based on Resonant Nano-Apertures

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

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Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To achieve high spatial resolution, most optical microscopes rely on expensive components such as high numerical aperture objectives or other lenses. Due to such free-space components, most high resolution microscopes still remain bulky, making them harder to integrate with cost-effective and miniaturized systems. However, in medicine/biology there exists a set of applications that would highly benefit from miniaturized high resolution microscopes that are ideally on chip. For this purpose, the proposed research plan aims to develop a new form of lens-free, compact digital microscope using a densely packed array of on chip nano-apertures. By properly designing an array of metallic nano-apertures, a high spatial resolution will be achieved even without using any lens or mechanical scanning. For this end, the designed nano-array will be fabricated onto a standard opto-electronic sensor array, and the object of interest will be in direct contact with the aperture array. As a result, the proposed on chip microscope can image two dimensional objects (>5 mm2 wide) at a high spatial resolution of d500 nm, and with a fast imaging speed of ~150 mm2/min. Overall, this application aims to advance the current state of on chip microscopy by using the key concepts of nano-photonics and plasmonics. Because the proposed approach is lensfree, it can be integrated with microfluidic systems in a compact space, and thus can significantly improve the way that high-throughput screening microscopy or point-of-care diagnostics are currently done. High resolution and rapid imaging technologies that can be integrated with disposable microfluidic devices are urgently needed today, especially for the developing world, where the resources are scarce. Another significant impact of the proposed imaging modality in health care may be in the field of histopathology. The proposed near-field imaging scheme can potentially enable quite rapid capturing of high resolution images of histopathology samples, which can then be transmitted over the internet to any physician in the world. This opportunity, which is termed "telepathology", will imply the global sharing of medical resources. For this end, this application may enable practical implementations of telepathology by significantly improving the imaging speed (>150 mm2/min). This rapid image acquisition speed may also have a significant impact on micro-array based genomics or proteomics, where massive amounts of high resolution data need to be collected in a short amount of time. [unreadable] [unreadable] PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Lensfree On-Chip Near-field Microscopy based on Resonant Nano-Apertures Project Narrative We propose to develop a novel high resolution and lens-free digital microscope that is based on optical resonance properties of a specially designed array of nano-apertures fabricated on an opto-electronic sensor chip. This new microscopy approach does not require any mechanical scanning or objective-lenses, and therefore offers a simpler and more compact approach for high resolution near-field imaging. Furthermore, the image acquisition and computation time is fairly short, making it a quite fast imaging modality that can significantly improve the way that high-throughput screening microscopy or point-of-care diagnostics are currently done. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]