Exploring On-Chip Structured Illumination Microscopy Using Complex Patterns of Nanoscale Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

The Abbe diffraction of visible light underlies the spatial resolution in conventional optical microscopy, limiting the smallest dimension of Airy disk to approximately 250 nm. The invention and evolution of super-resolution (SR) fluorescence microscopy in the past three decades has showcased the ability to break the diffraction limit. Among all SR microscopy technologies, the structured illumination microscopy (SIM) represents one of the most popular methods to enable live-cell SR imaging at high speeds. However, despite the great promise, there are a number of challenges for SIM. First, the standard SIM relies on the interference of two laser beams, so the attainable lateral resolution does not match other SR microscopy counterparts. Furthermore, the SIM microscopes tend to be bulky, expensive, and prone to misalignment. In this project, we propose to use the nanoscale organic light-emitting diodes (Nano-OLEDs) as an on-chip excitation source to illuminate samples with highly complex structured illumination patterns, termed NANOLED-SIM. The realization of NANOLED-SIM can unlock high-order Fourier components for the resolution of high-frequency information, with single shot of illumination. The molecular-beam holographic lithography (MBHL) developed in my group will be used to fabricate complex patterns of luminescent organic semiconductors, which will then be integrated in a top-emitting Nano-OLED device on silicon chips. We will experimentally examine the photoluminescence and electroluminescence radiation patterns of our Nano-OLEDs in both real and Fourier spaces to access to the low-frequency information. Lastly, we will test our fabricated Nano-OLED chips in fluorescence microscopy, followed by developing the deep-learning-assisted image deconvolution algorithms to reconstruct the SR images. The concept of NANOLED-SIM proposed here gives rise to not only enhanced resolution and imaging speed, but also miniaturized system and cost-effective instrumentation.