Massive Parallelization of STED Nanoscopy Using Optical Lattices

Abstract

Recent developments in stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy achieved nanometer scale resolution and showed great potential in live cell imaging. Yet, STED nanoscopy techniques are based on single point-scanning. This constitutes a drawback for wide field imaging, since the gain in spatial resolution requires dense pixelation and hence long recording times. Here we achieve massive parallelization of STED nanoscopy using wide-field excitation together with well-designed optical lattices for depletion and a fast camera for detection. Acquisition of large field of view super-resolved images requires scanning over a single unit cell of the optical lattice which can be as small as 290 nm*290nm. Interference STED (In-STED) images of 2.9 {\mu}m* 2.9 {\mu}m with resolution down to 70 nm are obtained at 12.5 frames per second. The development of this technique opens many prospects for fast wide-field nanoscopy.